Love And Lore is a print collection of three short stories published individually in electronic format. I've reviewed all three separately but for the purpose of this review, I've compiled them here.

Carolan Ivey's Wildish Things is a story that is... weird, let's just say. I get this impression that there is something not completely altogether with the heroine or the plot. Beith Molloy, our heroine, often overreacts, for example, to any small situation that she seems to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The plot is pretty bizarre, with the main characters doing things that normal folks would not do in the same situation. And no, don't get me started with the hero.

Beith has just arrived in Ireland to take on a job that will restart her photography career after an injury put her out of commission for a while. But she flies into a panic when she realizes that her friend and designated companion is not coming. She wants to go home now but "tour guide" Kellan O'Neill is not going to let Beith go home. Apparently it's okay to make a stranger stay in a strange land with no money (at least, that's the impression I get when the heroine flies into a tizzy on page 10 because, and I quote from the story: "Without any Irish money, how could she even tip a porter?"), especially when this friend is clearly on the verge of a nervous breakdown. No, don't ask me why this woman is traveling without money. Maybe it's standard heroine protocol.

Beith... well, she feels all these "feelings" that make her feel uneasy all over. She has an accident in the past that shattered some bones in her left leg. She has jet lag. If that is not enough, Kellan isn't actually her tour guide. Kellan has this great idea that he will kidnap her off for a summer fling that he believes will be good for the two of them. You want me to repeat that again?

It is probably a good thing that this story has Irish fancy mumbo-jumbo stuff like Hags and the standard, possibly compulsory "Oh no, we must have sex to save you from certain death!" scene, because this is one story that really needs magic to justify the crappy set-up. Ms Ivey knows how stupid Kellan is in this story, but frankly, there is nothing by the end of the story to convince me that this silly and spoiled big baby of man is actually husband material. But by the last page, the secondary characters are reassuring Beith (and therefore, by extension, me) that what Kellan did to Beith was stuff women's wet dreams are supposedly made of.

It does seem like magic has to come into play, along with secondary characters insisting with a persistence that feels tinged with desperation, to force Beith to go back to Kellan. Perhaps that is the best resolution to this story, as some kind of magic is no doubt required as a deus-ex-machina type plot device to make sense of this story.

Gia Dawn's A Fairy Special Gift is a short story revolving around our heroine Meara Magee who has the ability to see and communicate with fairies. The fairies in this story are not the nauseatingly sweet Tinkerbelle type though, they are more like mischievous little imps who have given Meara enough hard time that she has a few big flyswatters at hand at all time. One day these fairies decide to give Meara a present - a man - and therefore Meara finds herself an injured man.

If he is a normal person, Jamison Murphy, our biker dude hero, must think he's in an Irish-flavored episode of The Twilight Zone when he comes to consciousness to find himself encountering banshees, fairies, and of course Meara. But there is more to Jamison than meets the eye, so Meara is going to find herself in an adventure of sorts best described as "when the DEA meets the fairies".

A Fairy Special Gift is an amusing tale with ample whimsical and quirky aspects of the plot coming together very well. The main characters fall in love too quickly but that's to be expected given the length of the story. Jamison is a charming fellow while Meara can be most amusing when it comes to expressing her exasperation with those annoying fairies. These two characters have a nice thing going in the story.

For a short story, A Fairy Special Gift manages to be well-paced and complete. I don't feel that the characters are grossly underwritten or that the story feels like a much longer tale compressed into a shorter length. Instead, this one is a most charming and quirky short read that entertains me very well.

Sela Carsen's Heart Of The Sea is frantic, manic, and sometimes most amusing. It also leaves me feeling that there are too many things going on here in a story of its short length.

There is more to the story, but I'm just giving out a bare skeleton outline of the story so that I don't spoil too many things. Our heroine Meriel Byrne fell off a cliff seven years ago during a company party and somehow some family curse was triggered, saving her but causing her to transform into a Selkie at the same time. For the better part of those seven years, she was in seal form fending off horny male seals and daydreaming of that day when she finally becomes human again and swears off fish for good. Our hero Ronan Burbank was Meriel's boss - although he barely paid her any attention back then since he was the boss and she was pretty far down the company hierarchy - and since Meriel took a plunge, his personal fortune and career followed her down that cliff. They meet again today when she saves him from a boating mishap. What will happen now?

Meriel on the whole is an okay heroine although her constantly "on" attempt to sound like a MaryJanice Davidson heroine can get on my nerves at times. Poor Ronan doesn't have much opportunity to shine as a character given the length of the story. Still, after an initial burst of melodramatic overreaction in the earlier moments of his reunion with Meriel, he calms down and becomes a nice guy. But the author is trying to do something here by weaving the whole Selkie mythology around them. The story is interesting, at the very least, because of the progressive revelations about how the characters are intertwined with the Selkies.

But there are, I feel, way too many twists and turns in this story that end up causing the story to feel as if it is a much longer tale forcefully compacted into its current length. I would like to see the ideas that go into this story getting fleshed out a little bit more. In its current form, this is a pretty readable story despite some self-conscious attempts by the heroine to imitate a blog entry that tries too hard to be "snarky". But it's more of a teaser than a story that goes all the way to deliver the goods.

All in all, Love And Lore is a mixed bag. It's a pleasant read, but it's not anything memorable.

Rating: 71

This book at Amazon.com

This book at Amazon UK

Search for more reviews of works by these authors:

My Guestbook

Return to Romance eBook Central

Email