This was an interesting folk fantasy novel that really begged for more fleshing out. In an era were everything is a trilogy (or longer), this setting could have benefitted greatly from a deeper dive and slower burn. That said, the story was pretty comfy and a good fit for those who like folk magic/location specific fantasy. Not the best debut novel I read this year, but absolutely worth picking up. All characters felt like they had a place, nobody mentioned once and forgotten, and the place (according to the author's own note) was the purpose behind writing the novel in the first place. Having read this at the end, it makes sense why I had some detachment from the overall narrative. A third-person, character-driven book about Cornwall just didn't quite line up for me.

Yes, there's the folk magic aspect and that really kept it afloat (no pun intended) while the consistency in the characters kept it all grounded (okay maybe now it's a pun pair). A solid read, 3.5 stars on my own scale. If you're not bothered by style and grammar idiosyncrasies, you can stop reading here and go grab a copy if it's a genre you like.

Okay, now the nitpicky stuff my AuDHD brain just couldn't ignore and distracted me. The first 30ish (digital) pages had a handful of completely illogical statements. Not like "this is too fantastical for even fantasy" but "this is the opposite of what you just said". Example: MC is said to have found a new tea to have taste/odor characteristics she'd never show more experienced before and then a paragraph later it says she never even had a mouthful of the tea. And while there's a few stylistic choices in phrasing throughout the book(especially sentence fragments I think used for emphasis but often just didn't make sense) there are some really strange moments in those early pages that left me scratching my head. I've consumed plenty of media from the UK so I'm familiar with some differences from American English, but none of these moments seemed like that. I got the sense the beginning of the story was maybe added in after, that the major events in the back half of the book were written first and the beginning was made to fit...and maybe didn't get the same editorial pass. Honestly, if I wasn't reviewing the book, I may have just DNF-ed it to move onto another. But that's just me and my brain.

There's also a few moments in the book where I can't tell if the author didn't want to flesh out something for a paragraph or two, or was concerned about word count or what, but it's pretty annoying to see something like "they had a verbose argument" during a dialogue scene and then it just moves on. SHOW me the argument! This is part of why I think it should have been a duology at least, or a thicker novel, there's just too many moments of glossing over in favor of moving on so time passes.

And my final grievance--she does not use the Oxford comma. Okay, so a little tongue-in-cheek, but it seriously increases comprehension (especially for folks with garbage working memory like me) and I think it's essential in a writing style that makes liberal use of commas and sentence fragments both, so that it's clear when it's serial commas instead. show less