Striking in its magnitude and pace, Aeternum will find love in Scince-fiction/ fantasy book lovers and the contemporary reader while making its place in the world of haunting love stories…
The love story that stretches across centuries and past lives, builds the foundation of Robert Tobin’s Sci-fi novel, Aeternum. Mika and Ari cross path recurrently during their countless lifetimes through a never-ending reincarnation, both aware of every past lifetime they ever lived. It doesn’t take much for their immortal love story to become a revenge story through centuries. As Earth’s end approaches closer, they have a last chance to reconcile. Meanwhile, Tobin takes readers on a tour of ever-occurring evolution from the sack of Carthage through a Viking invasion of Spain to humanity’s uncertain future. The author has given countless lives to both Mika and Ari and managed to make them all interesting—whether it’s a small ordinary animal life or an enormously important human life. At the same time, he gives the reader a glimpse into the fantastic pre-historic period and a snapshot of an unknown future—what it will be like when it’s time for the earth to approach its end. Tobin’s narration is steady and ever alert to different voices—to love and destruction, to horrors of war, to beginnings and ends, and to changing times. The story is highly unpredictable, and Tobin manages a fairly satisfying momentum throughout the book. The book, through Mika and Ari’s journey, offers a kaleidoscopic perspective of evolution spanning the human history, and also makes various points about life—how the lives hang by a mere thread, how we want the world to make more sense than it actually does, how the destiny is uncertain, how the little things in a person’s life make a life worth living and a death worth dying, and how to figure it all out as they live. There is an intrigue to Mika’s love story that make the book a haunting read. The book is mostly about death, but the tone of the book keeps it from being oppressive. The recurring incarnations makes the story a bit repetitive, but the compulsions and enslavements of various forms that dominate lives of both Mika and Ari throughout centuries make for an engrossing read. Heartbreaking and consuming, the novel will take the reader on a fascinating journey of human evolution, incarnation, love, and destruction.
