Joanne Austen Brown, $2.99, ISBN 979-8201737184
Paranormal Romance, 2022

Sometimes, time travel romances suggest that the best solution for dealing with neurotic heroines that can’t stop weeping is throw them back in time, to a place with no modern plumbing, insulin, antibiotics, or wi-fi and somehow these barely functional heroines would magically flourish in such a time and place.

Ah, the kind of suspension of disbelief a romance reader has to do sometimes.

In Joanne Austen Brown’s Molly’s Laird, Molly Grace is indeed unable to stop weeping every other minute because her sister and the sister’s daughter were killed in an accident a few months back. She has left Melbourne for Scotland, but the tears keep coming anyway. Oh, and she sneaks out to sleep at some fairy hill place. 

Meanwhile, in 1823, Alasdair, the laird referenced in the title of this story, is also mourning, this time over the fact that he will never… find a mate?

“I do understand, Dair. You need a mate, someone who can share your troubles with.”

“Well, that is not going to happen. Is it? There is no one.” She watched him lower his head and examine his feet as they continued their climb up the hill.

I suppose that, for some people, being single is the worst tragedy ever.

He also goes to this fairy hill, maybe to take a lovelorn dump or something, and somehow, she’s there and he’s also there and woosh, now they are together.

Okay, some people will say it’s my fault, but this is part of some series, and I have not read any of the previous stories, so I’m pretty confused here. It looks like… the hero’s brother and his wife run some kind of matchmaking agency that pairs people from across time or something?

Here, Molly is certainly prepared to travel back in time and even discussed her upcoming stay in the land of pooping into a chamber pot beforehand with these people, so I can only wonder. 

Even if I ignore the meandering scenes of the main characters conversing with the secondary characters about how blissfully happy these secondary characters are or these characters’ backstories, this story lacks any genuine dramatic or external conflict to keep things interesting.

Molly takes to the whole thing like a fish to water, to the point that I can only wonder whether there will be a twist in the end, with everything revealed to be some virtual reality therapy session to help her deal with her grief. Spoiler: there’s no such thing here.

The romance happens so quickly and smoothly, there’s hardly any suspense or excitement to be had there. It’s just two bland characters gushing over another when they are not whining, or weeping in Molly’s case, like they are the only people in the universe that have ever lost someone dear or had to go about life being single. 

While there are some dramatic issues that come up now and then, there is hardly any suspense because there is a cluster of magical critters to quickly surround the heroine and woo-woo the problem away so quickly that I can only wonder what the point is when it comes to this story. 

In the end, I suppose this story could work as some kind of vicarious experience for people that are grieving over a real-life loss, but I’m personally not comfortable with this because it doesn’t offer any catharsis due to how everything in the heroine’s life is made perfect by magic.

There is a rather disquieting theme here, of how a grieving person just has to burrow deeper into denial and delusion until someone comes around to erase all grief and raw—without any effort on one’s part to confront their grief and accept it after a period of mourning. No, the whole anti-therapy here is more of waiting for someone to fix one’s problems just like that. Good luck finding that Fairy Hill in real life, though!

Anyway, this one is a readable story, and the author has a nice, elegant flourish to her narrative style. There are, however, not many ways to become engaged in the story or get emotionally invested in the romance because of how bland everything is and how it manages to stay uneventful and devoid of tension even when there is some kind of world-shattering conflict gripping the heroine. 

Still, I suppose there are far worse stories to fall asleep to, and this one does have a very pretty cover, for what that is worth.