Barbara Davies (1)

A quiet lesbian romance in the British countryside. When a librarian fleeing a mobster's revenge for testifying runs across a beautiful artist, the last thing she expects is for her to kill the people after her. The surprise of Tarian being Sidhe comes as much less of a shock after that. There are shocks still to come, however, as those who desire Tarian to return to the Sidhe decide to take advantage of this new leverage.

This is not so much a novel as it is three separate stories that show more immediately follow after one another, and the summary above only really describes the first. I really enjoy series of short stories that fall into an overarching plotline in general, but I found myself wishing the author had fleshed out any of the ones in the story. The first and third felt like they could have easily been turned into a whole novel of their own, and it would have helped with the general shallow feeling of the story.

In a romance, of course, the most important thing is the characters. And Tarian and Cassie never really feel fleshed out to me, unfortunately. Cassie felt a lot like your basic empty character for the reader to project into, honestly, which is really not my thing. She's sort of generically good, tends to get in over her head due to her insistence on saying the right thing, and was desperately lonely before Tarian. Tarian feels a little closer to well-fleshed out character, but she had a tendency to be the plot device. I did like Queen Mab, and would happily read a story about her romances.

That said, I liked it. It almost but not quite hit me in the domestic fiction spot - cozy fiction, maybe? But would I have cared if fantasy lesbian romances were slightly more common? Probably not, alas. show less

I enjoyed the book. I didn't expect it to be what turned out to be a series of short stories grouped together as chapters. But I like the author's work, in general, and liked the book.