Thistlemarsh is supposed to be romantasy. It sort of is, but maybe I just wasn’t into this one. I didn’t really see much of any romance, just a sort of “forced to work together and suddenly we might have feelings (kinda)”? The premise is fine: Mouse, a WWI nurse, has come home to care for her brother who served a as a soldier and now has severe PTSD and/or other mental/emotional issues. She learns that basically her only surviving family, an uncle who thought his sister married way beneath her, has died and left her the family estate with one big condition: she has to fix it up to standards in one month or it goes to else and along with it the money she needs to keep her brother in a facility that can help him.
The other catch? Thistlemarsh Hall is fairy-blessed, meaning that it has magic, and the Fairy King has been trying to get it back for centuries, and it can’t fall back into his hands. Obviously an impossible fairy-tale worthy task. Fairies disappeared from the world a long time ago, and no one quite knows why. Mouse, like her mother, has a bit of a fascination with Fairy stories, so she at least knows the lore (fey bargains, the importance of names, etc.). This is going to be necessary knowledge when she accidentally releases a Fairy man imprisoned and he offers to help her with her impossible project for a price. But what does Thornwood really want? What’s up with the weird house magic stuff? Can they work together to fix up the house in time?
This is all promising stuff, and Mouse is a good character as is her bestie, the vicar John, and even the Fairy servant Mickelwaithe. Maybe even add to this the dragon-dog Smudge. Thornwood though is kind of flat, and the romance side of things is really just not there. They spend so much time trouble shooting that there’s really no other plot; just all of a sudden, it’s time for the review to see if they’ve succeeded by the terms of the challenge, but there’s obviously another big hurdle or few to address, and these just get dropped in and don’t really feel like they fit. Maybe if I think about it more I’ll figure out why, but there just seems to be more attention to descriptions of little things (not an inherently bad thing) at the expense of actual plot and character.
