This is a romantasy novel, so a little outside my usual genre scope, but it's published by Alcove Press, who are under the same umbrella as Crooked Lane Books. I've been enjoying what they have sent out for review of late and I enjoyed this book too, albeit perhaps not in the way that the author intended. Fundamentally it's a romance between a pair of characters who may not be who they seem to be. Who they really are seems to tie to Celtic mythology and that's pretty cool. I'm up for that.

The primary character, for instance, is supposed to be Emma Harrington, but she doesn't seem to actually be Emma Harrington from the very outset. The Harringtons are incredibly rich but Emma seems to be a troublesome child, to the degree that her mother Flossie is threatening the Boa Island Sanitarium as a way to deal with her. As the book starts, she's vanished but has been found after a couple of days at the local hellmouth, some sort of combination of pool and cave where the water appears to be toxic. It doesn't affect her at all but when she splashes one of her rescuers, he burns horribly and later dies of his wounds.

If that isn't enough to make us wonder, she actively denies being Emma Harrington, claiming to be a young lady named Rua instead. She's found by the search party looking for Emma and she looks exactly like Emma, but is completely oblivious to who Emma is. Of course, that's taken as a loss of memory, especially as she quickly accepts her fate, at least temporarily, realising that it would be in her best interest to not be confined in a sanitarium. Given how troublesome she is to her parents, memory loss becomes just another reason to throw up their hands in despair.

The most crucial thing to know about the Harringtons is that they're nouveau riche. That makes them important in Conleth Falls in upstate New York where they maintain a country estate but it's not remotely enough for them to be accepted into Society in New York City in 1870 and that is everything Flossie cares about. Fortunately for her, there's an important new hotel project in play that relies on three things: Richard Fitzgerald's status; land that's owned by an Irishman, Finn, Lord Donore; and Ned Harrington's money. The Harringtons move from Conleth Falls to a mansion in Manhattan and a hectic upcoming calendar of social events. Lord Donore is new in town, too.

I believe what we're supposed to care about most is the burgeoning relationship between Rua—officially Emma—and Finn. She bumps into him on her first day in Manhattan, wandering the streets early in the morning and ending up at the building site entirely by accident. He thinks she must be a prostitute so hands her a half dollar to leave, but her response is completely not what he expects and it's the spark for a serious connection, even if neither of them seek it and Richard Fitzgerald is so keen to build a hotel that he's already offered Finn his daughter's hand.

I'm not going to complain about this angle because it's handled well, with a natural connection at the heart of it and plenty of biting dialogue, especially from Rua, but only Flossie is actively pushing for it to happen. Rua doesn't want anything to do with anybody and Finn knows that it would be in his interest to marry Annette Fitzgerald, so expects to announce their engagement sometime soon. Of course, circumstance and his good nature contrive to place Rua and Finn in the same place often and in ways that naturally escalate.

What I really cared about most was how neither of these characters seemed to fit. While we do learn some of why Emma Harrington is seen as problematic, that takes time. Instead, we meet her nightmare of a mother and immediately find ourselves on her side. When she gets thrown into Society in New York City clearly against her will and well out of her comfort zone to aid her mother's ambition, nobody is on her side and some actively work against her with rudeness or worse. From the little that we've learned about Emma, we can't imagine that she would accept this treatment without at least some resistance, but Rua has even fewer compunctions about speaking her mind and that was my favourite aspect of the novel.

Her father Ned isn't a bad man but he's very much a supporting player, in this book and also in his life. The text calls him "a nice man who didn't seem to grasp how much trouble he was in." As such, he spends much of the story drunk and all of it in the shadow of either his wife or Richard Fitzgerald. Flossie, on the other hand, is a driven woman. She is dead set on becoming Someone in Society and she doesn't care how much damage she'll do to get there. We feel for Emma the outsider and we especially feel for Rua the double outsider. She hasn't even been trained.

It's also not difficult to feel for Finn. Sure, he makes an ass of himself during his first meeting with Rua, but he makes up for it through subsequent actions. While he's also trying to use his status as an Irish nobleman to get ahead in business, he isn't the heartless wretch that all the people he finds himself working with are. He spends a lot of time and money at St. Brigid's, an orphanage where he even reads to the kids. When the hotel in which he's staying burns down, prompting a convenient stay with the Harringtons, he runs into the inferno, lifts a huge beam off a woman and carries her out to safety. It's almost superhero stuff and it plays into the idea that, while he might indeed be Finn, Lord Donore, he may be something more than that too.

The problem is that, while I'm sure Kelsie Sheridan Gonzalez wants us to get onto Rua and Finn's side and I'd be shocked if any reader fails to do that, I wonder how much we actually care about them and how much more we quickly hate everybody else and want to see them receive a long overdue comeuppance. My enjoyment was partly through them slowly but inexorably moving together but mostly through relishing how much they piss off these hypocritical snobs who run New York society. I'm sure Gonzalez set that up deliberately, but I wonder if she's ever realised how much it takes over in the absence of much of an actual plot.

Sure, there's a hotel being built and that's what sets everything in motion, but it's a MacGuffin rather than anything of any real substance for us to care about. Really, what we're supposed to care about is the romance between Rua and Finn, along with the background of why Emma was deemed so troublesome. I'm not going to spoil it, other than to point out that it ties into Gaelic mythology and that's where the book is going with both Rua and Finn. However, it waits a long while to get going and almost the entire novel before it gets to anywhere substantial, at which point it's done.

And that means that anyone reading this for the romance may be thoroughly entertained but anyone reading it for the fantasy elements rather than the romance may be disappointed. It's a quick read, certainly, and Gonzalez keeps it moving in careful fits and starts, teasing us with a connection between Rua and Finn, than pulling back from it before teasing us with closer one. However, it's a historical romance with a sparse fantasy element rather than a full on romantic fantasy ~~ Hal C F Astell