The sorceresses coming to take little bits of peoples’ hearts is a standard in the kingdom. Crops flourish, birthing mothers, animal or human, never die, and achingly beautiful women in impossible carriages show up and pull tiny bits of your heart out of your chest. That’s how the magic is powered in the kingdom, and that’s how it has been for as long as Foss Butcher has been alive, and that is how it seems it will always be. One other constant is that Foss is far too plain for her own townsfolk to notice her, never mind someone beautiful and magical from the big city. But that’s all before the one lone sorcerer appears and Snags Foss’s heart by mistake.
Now, Foss has to stomp off (it is a grand inconvenience after all) to the grand City to try and get her heart back (or at least get it to stop hurting). Once she gets to the sorcerer’s Sylvester’s House that appears to be as mercurial as its master, Foss finds herself his housekeeper, where the only conversations she seems to be having are with Cornelius the talking cat and the one-sided ones with the walls.
But as Foss starts to learn more about magic on the whole and Sylvester in general, she begins to realize that she’s not the only unwilling captive of magic, and that the kingdom is far more dangerous and warped than she ever thought. Well, her practicality is something people always talked about with her (as well as her plainness, her clumsiness, and her general unsuitability for second looks), so if she has to save the kingdom, she’ll do it. Even if she has to drag Sylvester, Cornelius, (and her own treacherous heart) along for the ride.
I enjoyed this book immensely, even if I do wonder how much of that was because it’s basically a remix of Howl’s Moving Castle; I mean, you can basically see Wynne Jones’s fingerprints etched into this book, it’s so much a remix. That doesn’t detract from A Harvest of Hearts, however you do have to acknowledge how heavily influenced a book is. I will also say that for a book that bills itself as a “cozy Romantasy”, this is heavy with the sexual explicit content, as well as the blood and mild body horror. I don’t know many cozy Romantasy books that are quite so blunt about masturbation, but that’s me.
Foss is an interesting heroine; she’s not the lithe, blonde, waif that apparently this book wants you to believe you’d expect for a heroine. She’s on the short side, with apparently unattractive red hair and freckles (as a freckled redhead myself, I object to this characterization), and the kind of build you’d expect for a woman who works in her father’s butcher shop. And yes, that is why her last name is apparently Butcher; this leads to me wondering if the character Dav who is a fishmonger has the full name of Dav Fishmonger. She also has absolutely no self-esteem, a fact that radiates off almost any page she’s featured on, which is the entire book. And I understand (and sympathize) that confidence isn’t something everyone has, but it got a bit old after the first two hundred pages or so.
Sylvester, meanwhile, I suppose has self esteem. I’m not quite sure, because other than “breathtakingly beautiful sorcerer who nervously runs little balls of fire across his fingers, sulks mightily, and doesn’t know how to properly sit in chairs”, he doesn’t have much character to him. I know he and Foss fall in love with each other outside of the slavish devotion towards Sylvester having her heart Snagged causes in Foss; I just don’t know if I see it happening on the page. (Aside: I love how the book pushes the name of “Foss” as commonplace, and names like “Darius”, “Sylvester”, “Clarissa” and “Camilla” as fantastical and out of place.)
Cornelius, meanwhile, is one of the highlights of this book. Eames manages to write a talking cat that straddles the line between “overly cutesy cat” (there is no meowing or “cat-themed” word puns in his dialogue) and “is that a talking cat, or a cat-shaped human?”. Of course he’s a small black cat, as he is Sylvester’s, and black is the man’s aesthetic. His sisters (yes, the twelve sorceresses and Sylvester are related) are bright and colorful, and Sylvester is only decorating in black until they invent something darker.
When all is said and done, I would recommend the book, especially if you enjoyed Howl’s Moving Castle. Yes, there are a few things I can nitpick on, but on the whole they don’t overly detract from the book. One question does resound at the end though; do we have a kingdom with a Dennis now, or what?
