A River Enchanted by Rebecca Ross is a fairy tale only gently pulled into the adult sphere. Following a rather embittered bard named Jack, this story takes and modifies some expected tropes not only of the fantasy romance drama, but the “worldly character returning to their home town” genre, and follows Jack as he falls back in love with the magical isle of Cadence and re-connects with his childhood friend-slash-rival.

As a romance, A River Enchanted gets a lot of things right. The dynamics between the main and secondary couple are engaging and interesting and often deeply romantic, with some of the best tender moments and confessions I’ve read in some time and an unexpected and somewhat unusual storyline between the secondary couple in particular. There is, in particular, one moment of confession that I copied down for my own personal use later on. I truly love Ross’s talent for prose, it’s engaging, beautiful, and hard to put down. She creates a gorgeous and lush environment for her characters to exist in, but perhaps most importantly, it feels like she really understands the setup-and-payoff dynamic of romance, the wish fulfillment aspects, and just what kind of men a lot of people who like men are looking for.

The romance in general is extremely tame, but not in a way that feels sexless. The characters feel passionate toward each other and there doesn’t seem to be much hand-wringing about loving someone who’s had other partners or is sexually experienced. I suppose this is the sort of thing certain readers are looking for who want to read slow-burn romance and not “spice.” According to Ross’s website, these scenes rate 6/10 on the heat scale, but maybe I’m just a jaded old tortoise because I’d rate them a 2 at most. I am whatever the opposite of a Young Adult reader is, probably.

On that tangent, I would like to point out that Ross has a long and thorough list of trigger warnings on her website for those who would prefer them. Personally, I didn’t find any of the content in the novel to be beyond what I would expect as a fantasy reader, mostly regarding swords and violence. It felt clear to me from the tone of the book that things wouldn’t go as dark or distressing as it potentially could, although I appreciate the occasional acknowledgment of certain dark realities within the prose. This is not a world entirely free of certain darkness, it’s just free of it in this book.

I prefer my fantasy (and my romance) to have a bit more edge and bite, and generally be a hell of a lot more queer. However, I can understand that was not the intent with this story, as it does seem to be categorized as YA in some places. I suspect that many readers do not come to the fantasy romance genre to take huge emotional risks. I was never bored with this book, so I don’t want to judge it too harshly for simply not being to my taste in that respect. The truth of the matter is I found it so engaging that I flew past my reading goals for this book every day and didn’t even notice. I never had a moment where I felt completely trapped by the book’s intended audience, which is not something I often say about YA books.

When it comes to the character writing, it does commit one of the sins I find most noticeable in that the children characters are all just too good to be true. They are well-behaved, generally mindful of authority, and just so adorable. None of them hedge into be being sickeningly cute, but as someone whose worked with children off and on, I kept waiting for more. At least the main characters were acknowledged to have been awful as children in the past.

Aside from the portrayal of children, something kept nagging at me as I fell into the lore of Cadence, something that’s been on my mind since the last few fantasy novels I’ve read, both which I liked a lot less than this one. And that is the role of traditional storytelling and myth and what it means to take from it, and at what point does it feel like something has been scrubbed clean and sanitized for its audience?

Most, if not all, fantasy tends to borrow from specific archetypes, and reappropriates them often in a pretty willy-nilly way. It’s more or less expected, for better or worse. So I found myself tripping on my own expectations in this setting so clearly influenced by Scotland, with supernatural entities so clearly based off of the sidhe, fairies, etc., yet simply calling them spirits. The main character is a bard and yet we don’t hear any names of figures of epic tales. In general, the setting of Cadence feels somewhat bereft of a long history, existing in a sort of static, solitary place with its own rules and stories, which makes it feel a little lonely. The name Cadence itself is kind of strangely vague, it just made me think of someone striking a xylophone or discussing dissonance and assonance in college poetry courses. Given some of the things we learn about the functions of the island at the end of the book, the name just gets stranger the more you think about it.

I would have expected with the main character as a bard that storytelling, music, and the history songs and epics carry with them would play more of a part. Is it better, to create a world where well-known legacies don’t exist at all? Is it because faeries now have an extremely unfortunate association with certain book series that have transformed them beyond the vocabulary used to describe them? Is it to create distance, to create a separate place where this lore is not beholden to the more strict rules and names of certain figures of folklore, and to avoid criticisms of appropriation of lack of research from an American writer? It honestly felt at times like the book was avoiding mentioning its own influences, yet to me, it felt so clearly based on specific, named folklore that has often been portrayed across many fantasy books. Scotland’s legacy of colonization weighed heavy on my mind.

It feels all feels very white without feeling Scottish to me, despite the time and dedication paid to beautiful Scottish scenery and unpleasant Scottish weather, with the caveat I have not been to Scotland and have absolutely zero context or expertise, let alone legacy connected to Scotland. I want to believe that Ross was going for subtlety here, or perhaps it was truly out of respect to try and differentiate her world from other fantasy novels, but it left me scratching my head. Given the way the fae echo across many different stories, perhaps it’s fine to simply reinterpret once again. I’m not sure if it would have been better if the novel were more clear on its fokloric influences, but something about the way it avoided saying fairy aside from an occasional ‘the folk’, along from its more emotions-based, less sexual romance and focus on marriage just felt very … gulp… Christian.

It doesn’t help that the main character has a name that’s Christian in origin. Then again, a lot of books would probably fall apart if we start asking about the name origins of Jack, John, etc..

However, my feelings were confirmed for me when Ross thanks the Heavenly Father in her Acknowledgments sections. Ah.

I’ve made the joke that I’m straight on my parents’ side in a book for a similarly tame (and, in my opinion, less fun to read) fantasy romance novel recently, and now’s the part where I also confess that I am Christian on that side as well, particularly my father’s side. Mind you, these are Progress Pride flag flying Christians, Christians who decorate their altars in rainbows for Pride. A River Enchanted does have some allyship in the form of a very minor female side character with a wife and some moments that could be interpreted as mildly bisexual from this ancient genderqueer tortoise’s perspective. I do not think this is an unsafe book for queer readers, but I have to wonder if perhaps one of the reasons it doesn’t lean more into the fairies and the darkness is because it hopes to appeal more to Christians. Or maybe the YA reading demographic is Christianmaxxing now.

I’m torn on rating this one a fair bit, because I did feel like the dialogue and language were lovely to read. There’s a specific romantic passage between the main couples where I immediately copied the dialogue down so I could read and share it, which is not something I often do. There were many parts of the book that felt well-realized, it was only in the shadow of legacy of the stories it borrowed from that it felt underbaked.

My mother was so eager to get her hands on this one she started reading my library copy before I finished the novel, and I just know this is going to rate a 10 on the Mom scale. Because of the cliffhanger this one ends on, I’ll definitely wind up reading the sequel because she will want to read it right away. I'm not sure I'd otherwise care enough to, personally.