Review by Frank Plowright
Joan is trapped. She awakens in one dated romantic saga after another, set in different periods throughout history, sometimes with a killer tracking her. She always turns down marriage proposals, though, and as much as anything of the background was revealed in Vol. 1, it’s that refusal was somehow a mistake. The first volume was a hugely enjoyable pastiche with a mystery bolted on, and our review noted the parameters would need broadening to sustain interest. That’s exactly the path Tom King and Elsa Charretier have taken here.
It doesn’t seem that way at first as Joan finds herself back in 1963 with the choice of a beatnik or an awkward personification of Clark Kent. However, this time she takes a different path and remains fulfilling the expectations of a housewife of the era over the entire book.
Love Everlasting began as a romance series with horror gradually introduced, but this volume ramps up the horror. It’s not in the traditional way of killers or monsters, although there is someone who covers both those bases, but it examines the horror of dislocation. Joan possesses enough self-awareness to know she shouldn’t be in 1963, while the novels she reads remind her of past experiences. It’s always 1963 and Joan remains trapped, so how would that impact on anyone’s sanity? And that’s not the only tragedy presented.
As she did with every setting used in the previous volume, Charretier delivers perfect period art, with researched visual details and credible people occupying what by Joan’s very presence is a pastiche stage. However, there’s no exaggeration or knowing visual wink, just one very polished page following another, with the occasional delightful extra adornment as per the sample art.
There are no clues as to the prevailing mystery of who Joan actually is, and why she’s living a life with personal choice absent. King spends this volume wringing out every available option for period melodrama in what’s forever 1963, yet despite knowing that, the result is still continually sad for Joan’s awareness of being trapped. Credit also for a penultimate chapter offering a very different, natural and touching love story. Joan’s entire life in 1963 plays out as a tragedy, so what awaits in Vol. 3?
