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The Sweet Rowan

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Pub Date Mar 18 2021 | Archive Date Apr 18 2021

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Description

THE MAGIC OF LOVE

Penny Thornton loved her magic with all her heart. After being burned in a barn fire while trying to save people and creatures, she despaired she’d never feel magic again.

When her fingers brush a letter from Scotland addressed to a neighbor, Penny’s heart soars. There’s magic in that letter, and she’s certain the source of the magic is its author or his location.

Defying convention and general good sense, which does not recommend a high-born young lady travel alone, she constructs a tangled ruse to deceive her family, and takes off to the wilds of Scotland.

What awaits her are challenges she never bargained for. But in navigating the obstacles and hurdles she encounters, she finds a man with a heart of gold, and a family in need of the magic of her love.

THE MAGIC OF LOVE

Penny Thornton loved her magic with all her heart. After being burned in a barn fire while trying to save people and creatures, she despaired she’d never feel magic again.

When her...


Available Editions

ISBN 9781953810397
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Average rating from 9 members


Featured Reviews

One of the best romantic novels I have read in along while!
I loved everything about this book, the plot, the characters, the writing - it is all so very good. Even some twists and turns in there!
There is a reason Keira Dominguez books get 5 stars- they earn every one. I've found a new favorite author!
Aside from some minor grammatical and spelling errors, it is solid, I cannot find anything negative here.
Highly recommend!

I received a free copy of this book via NetGalley and am voluntarily leaving a review.

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Fantasy and Regency Romance combined, sign me up!

Due to an unexpected accident, Penny Thornton has lost her magic. She used to have the power to fly into the air, but now she’s earthbound and at a loss. When a letter from her old governess comes laden with magic, Penny is determined to find the source to try to restore her own. Stealing her governess’s identity, Penny heads off to the wilds of Scotland to try to find a way to reclaim her lost magic and finds a broken family in need of more than she is prepared to give, instead.

I was prepared for this to be far more gothic in nature than it was, but it actually has the pacing and lightness of a novel from the Regency era. If you like Jane Austen and want more of the same gentle sort of story only with modern language and writing style, this book is for you. It’s most like Persuasion in that it is very reflective and focused on small details that add up to something larger, small incidents and small kindnesses or slights that seem very important and strongly felt. It also reminded me a bit of both Anne Bronte’s Agnes Grey (a story about another governess facing extreme challenges) and Charlotte Bronte’s Villette in tone, but again, with totally modern language.

I would actually classify this far more like sweet romance than the fantasy and SF that it came up with as a category on NetGalley. The magic is a major driver of the plot, but the relationships among the characters are what make this book work so well. And people who are here for magic shouldn’t be driven away by the romance aspects because there are a couple of smooches and that’s it. It’s all slow-burn unresolved sexual tension and well done at that.

Dominguez is wonderful at characterization. The relationships in this story seem earned. Nobody is an obvious stereotype, even the person who turns out to be the villain of the piece, and it’s a wonderfully subtle sort of villainy, too. Kudos. The children, who are often grating in this sort of story, are actually well-rounded human beings and not just plot devices. They are all given moments to shine as individuals and reasons for us to care for them.

I’ve read a lot of books and I saw a lot of the plot of this coming a mile away, but I still enjoyed the journey to get to the dénouement and that speaks to the author’s skill. Penny is very young and you enjoy watching her figure it out even if you already have.

The one thing that is really bad about this book is the editing. There are egregious errors in the text, including continuity errors with character names, spelling, punctuation, paragraphs, and other really obvious things that should have been caught by any competent editor. Things that would have been caught by spellcheck or a run through any online editing tool. Just pony up for the pro version of Grammarly and you wouldn’t have had 90% of this. If your publisher doesn’t have your back or doesn’t employ editors with the skill set to find comma errors, spelling errors, and continuity errors, it’s up to you as author to give them a completely clean manuscript. The issues were so frequent that it kept pulling me out of the story and that’s a shame because the story is terrific.

If you’re not a former English teacher like me, you probably will be less annoyed with the errors and will enjoy this book even more than I did. I will look for more of this author’s work.

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Despite the books not being linked as a series, I think they'll be better understood when read in order.

This is Penny's story, who was introduced in the first book, Her Caprice. Following a fire accident, she loses her powers, and is desperate to get them back. When she accidentally touches a letter from Scotland, she becomes convinced she must go there to retrieve her magic.

When she meets Malcom, she mistakes him for her an employee when in fact he's her employer. He's the widower with three children in need of a governess, and his late wife's mother lives with them too.

At first, the children and their grandmother don't want to like Penny since she's English, but they slowly learn to like her when they see who devoted she is. Penny fumbles a lot, as she doesn't any training, but she learns to love the children and genuinely wants the best for them .

As for Malcom, he holds back from trusting her, but the more he sees how she cares for his children, the closer he wants to get to her.

It's a clean Regency with subtle magic. The historical and geographic setting are very well done, and the villain was truly perfidious.

Very sweet ending.

I received a copy from the publisher via NetGalley and his is my honest opinion.

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