Thank you to the author and Netgalley for sharing this book with me in exchange for my honest review.

This book follows three young women, Sorcha, Fiona and Nemain, as they navigate a world seeped in druidic magic inspired by Irish mythology. The book uses quite a few Irish worlds, particularly when describing magic, but the world itself is quite removed from the traditional folklore.

We see the world through Sorcha’s and Fiona’s eyes to begin with, we get a glimpse of their friendship and and we learn that druidic magic is forbidden and druids are hunted and imprisoned. The first part of the book felt quite slow for me, even as Fiona moves into the castle to become a queen. Later on we get glimpses of Nemain’s life, and her dark power - and the three ‘destinies’ intertwine later on.

I personally really liked Nemain’s character, the way she travels through this Otherworld is quite original, and the elemental magic was quite cool. I also loved that this book included some queer representation, moving away from the boring ol’ heteronormative romance, which is refreshing.

However, the pacing of the story and the relationships between characters felt a bit flat, there was no momentum between one scene and the next, and it made progression feel somewhat disjointed for me. I felt like the book would have benefitted from more editing, to tighten up the plot and some of the dialogue. There were moments when the writing felt repetitive and we got a lot of ‘telling’ rather than showing, as characters were describing the plot or lengthy exposition to each other. For example, without giving spoilers, after a major event that was shown to the reader ‘live’ and described quite vividly, one character spends an entire additional chapter describing it in detail, so we read the same thing twice. In other instances, I also spotted some minor inconsistencies, which took me out of the story somewhat (i.e. one character who has been described as someone not to be trusted from the start is described later on as “her once faithful maid”).

In terms of warnings, this book also contains violence and sexual abuse, and I find it quite jarring that so many fantasy romance books include assault as a plot point - I wish that was not so prevalent in this genre.

This book was not for me, but it may be interesting for those who love loose Celtic mythology adaptations in their fantasy romance.