Heart’s Blood by Gail Dayton – review

We don’t review a lot of out and out romance on this site, but I wanted to talk about this book because I think it would have a crossover appeal to certain fantasy readers.  I picked this book up for a light read, mostly because the carnival font on the cover caught my eye, and the story blurb on the back sounded interesting enough.  I didn’t realize it’s the second book in a series until I was partway through; it does easily stand alone, but if you insist on reading things in order there is a first book (titled New Blood and featuring different people as the main characters—they show up as minor characters here).   

It is set in Victorian London and is a paranormal historical; the premise and basic world-building seemed very reminiscent of both Gail Carrigers’ Soulless and Marissa Doyle’s Leland sisters series—none of which I have actually read, mind, so they could be very different, but I’m basing this comparison on the idea of an “urban fantasy”/paranormal romance set in Victorian England and dealing with magic and/or the supernatural being similar premises.  So if you’re into that new and, it seems, growing subgenre, this series may be a next step for you; I just can’t guarantee it will be something new to the subgenre.

For me—a historical romance reader who also likes fantasy—this was a fun book.  The writing was easy to read, both in the sense that the prose flowed well and in the sense that it was well edited (romance, at least in my experience, is notorious for being riddled with typos and glaring grammatical flaws).  The story moved quickly, and while the pacing was a little bit uneven (some days are covered over the course of 50 pages while others over the course of 50 words), the places where Things Actually Happen were expansive enough that none of the action felt rushed or too compressed.

The basic setting is a Victorian London where magic is openly practiced and studied, if not entirely accepted by the average citizen.  There are four main branches of magic—conjury (raising ghosts and spirits), alchemy (element magic), wizardry (growing things magic) and sorcery (blood magic); sorcery is almost exclusively practiced by women, and with the suppression of women’s rights there haven’t been practicing sorcerers for several generations.  The story focuses Pearl Parkin, a young woman born into an affluent family who is now orphaned and destitute.  She knows she has some magical ability, and when she finds Greyson Carteret, head of the conjurer’s guild, accused of murder, she blackmails him into making her his apprentice in exchange for her help alerting his powerful friends to his predicament.  As they begin to work together to solve the murder he was accused of, they discover more about the nature of sorcery and its interactions with other magic than they bargained for…and that Grey might have stumbled into either the best kind of partnership or the worst kind of manipulation with Pearl.

There are definitely romance features in the story; time spent talking about how much s/he is attracted to him/her, and a couple scenes of explicit sexuality, but it was by no means the dominant feature of the story.  It is also a murder mystery and a fight to save the world story, and at times those actually overshadowed the romantic storyline so much that it sometimes jarred me when she went back to their personal drama for a few pages.  As for the drama itself, I appreciated that they both had to do some growing and some self-realization—and try being without each other again—in order to make a relationship truly workable.  It seemed true to the characters.

The larger plot (series-wide) was also advanced both with new discoveries for how to weave sorcery with other magic and changes in the magical dead zones that were apparently a big part of the first story.  We also get a pretty clear idea of what the next book will involve; according to the author’s website the draft is finished and will be out sometime in the next year.  In the meantime I guess I’ve got the first one to catch up on….

So bottom line, if you’re someone who reads historical romance and also likes magic stories, you’ll probably enjoy this.  Or if you’re someone who likes paranormal/urban fantasy and thinks it might be interesting to see it in a historical context.  Or someone who likes historical fantasy and doesn’t mind the romance aspects.  It was exactly what I was hoping for; charming, sweet, dark when it needed to be, and ultimately uplifting.