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 makes 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 an ex 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. ( )