Rears & Vices
by E.M. Caro
Spring is the ideal time of year for a salt-crusted, grog-drenched pirate romance — and Caro’s REARS & VICES (Tides & Troth, 367 pp., paperback, $18.99) was everything I wanted. Our men have some impressive Age of Sail names: Everard Anderson de Anglada is a British Navy captain on the Great Lakes who teams up with a former lieutenant, Preston D’Arcy, to rescue his sometime hookup Vitya Varfolomey from a death sentence for piracy. Their naval careers in tatters, the three sailors escape to Vitya’s outlaw fleet in the Caribbean — with Everard as Vitya’s new matelot, or legally recognized partner. This real-life form of pirate marriage ties Everard to the mysterious Russian captain, even as he reconnects with D’Arcy, whose subordinate rank had always prevented Everard from pursuing the relationship.
It’s a delicate poly romance, all simmering heat and devastating secrets — neither Navy men nor Caribbean pirates are known for forthright communication in relationships — and it unfolds amid gorgeously textured sea battles. The heeling of the ship, the deafening blast of cannon! You’d swear you could feel the bite of the wooden rails beneath your hands.
by Amy Coombe
Where Caro’s book sweeps across continents, Coombe’s gentle romantasy STAY FOR A SPELL (Ace, 384 pp., $30) plants its heroine determinedly in one place, a choice that lets the book grow surprisingly deep emotional roots. Coombe has the Diana Wynne Jones knack for starting with simple things — a princess, a curse — and letting them develop until they feel complex and engrossing.
Princess Tanadelle — Tandy for short — is not her kingdom’s ruler or even its heir. While her parents and sister manage the actual work of statecraft, Tandy travels the realm kissing babies and cutting ribbons. This is her royal duty, and as empty as it feels sometimes, Tandy has never had a chance to learn who she is apart from her role as princess.
Then she wanders into a small-town bookshop and finds herself cursed, unable to leave the premises until she finds her heart’s desire. As her parents send prince after prince her way to try to break the spell, Tandy organizes bookshelves, hires a goth part-dragon teenager as an assistant and banters with an outrageously flirtatious pirate named Bash, who has been cursed with an inconvenient fear of water.
We’re just as trapped as Tandy is — the narration remains with her in the bookshop — so we share both her curiosity and her frustration. The more time passes, the more she starts to feel how tragic it would be to stay locked in place because you never found that something — or someone — that was your true heart’s desire. At the start it’s playfully comic; by the end, it’s bittersweet and utterly gorgeous.
Thistlemarch
by Moorea Corrigan
Lastly, and perfect for reading in the garden as the greenery returns to the world, we have Corrigan’s dreamlike, folkloric THISTLEMARSH (Berkley, 419 pp., $30). Readers looking for a low-heat variation on modern romantasy will find much to enjoy here — and readers who’ve loved the fairy-adjacent historical romances of Robin McKinley or Mercedes Lackey will find themselves right at home.
Thistlemarsh Hall is a fairy-blessed house, though its glory days and visits from the Faerie King are long past. Dusty and decaying, it has barely outlived the last Lord Dewhurst and his heir, who perished in the trenches of the Great War. Now his niece, a nurse nicknamed Mouse, is the new Lady Dewhurst — but only if she can repair Thistlemarsh within a month. Otherwise the estate — and all the money for her shellshocked brother’s care — goes to a loathsome cousin.
Mouse is above all things a practical sort of person, grounded and pleasingly wry and inclined toward hard work. Nursing the wounded of World War I left her with few illusions that broken things can be mended as if the damage never happened. And it’s immediately clear to her that not all the work in the world will be enough to fix this moldering mansion within the allotted time.
Right on cue, and even though no High Fae have been seen in a hundred years, a faerie lord named Thornwood suddenly appears, offering a bargain to magically restore the hall. Mouse’s mother always warned her about faerie bargains — the legends of their going wrong are many, and never end well for the mortals involved. But Mouse doesn’t feel she has a choice.
The bargain is struck and the repairs begin — but Thistlemarsh Hall turns out to have ideas, and magic, of its own. Faerie houses have dangers that mortal nurses can’t foresee, and magic has rules that even arrogant faerie lordlings cannot escape. It’s a subtle book but a thrilling one, especially toward the end, where Mouse can sense something going wrong but can’t quite tell what it is. This is not the kind of fairy tale that sets up good versus evil, but the older, stranger kind that sets up power versus love. And while we know which side is going to win, we’re not always sure what form the victory will take.
