O. R. Melling is a woman, who was born in Ireland, lived in Canada for most of her childhood and young-adulthood, and moved back to Ireland as an adult. The name is a pseudonym, not that it matters, and her website has annoying trailing stars after the mouse. Other than that, it’s a good website, and a good pseudonym. This is not her first book, but it is the first in this particular series, and the first that I’ve read.

Gwen(hyfar) and Findabhair (Gwen-a-var and Finn-a-veer) are cousins; Gwen lives in America and Findabhair in Ireland. They’re best friends, despite the distance, and their names are even the same. Gwenhyfar and Findabhair both mean ‘white lady’, but the first is the Welsh derivation and the second is Irish. The summer that they are both sixteen, Gwen visits Findabhair and they decide to search for Faerie. Unfortunately, they find it: Findabhair is kidnapped, after a fashion, by the Sidhe high court, and Gwen must find her.

As a yarn goes, it’s a pretty good tale; there’s a lot of action and a lot of movement. Gwen and Findabhair travel to many different parts of Ireland, and Melling describes each lovingly. The plot has romance, action, adventure, magic, friendship, danger, history — everything it needs to make it interesting. Melling has degrees in Celtic mythology and history, so she knows what she’s talking about. It felt to me as if she had chosen every single name, location, and detail with an eye for accuracy and verisimilitude.

The minor characters were delightful; Katie Quirke, an aptly named cow farmer, was my favorite. She’s described as a bit impetuous, but she genuinely cares. There’s a leprechaun, as well, who used the line, “Why waste a perfectly good stereotype?” A wise woman, called Granny, fills out my trio of favorite characters.

The main characters, unfortunately, were a bit less defined. Findabhair was supposedly the strong, Gothy one, and Gwen the girly, quiet one, but neither behaved particularly within their roles. Gwen supposedly had some internal debates regarding courage, but it seemed to me that she never behaved in a cowardly way. Findabhair abandoned the Goth look early on, and essentially spent the rest of the book following around a boy. Although she informed Gwen at least once that she’d never been known for mincing her words, she did quite often.

I also had issues with Melling’s writing. She used too many synonyms for ‘to say’: in one two-page spread, I found five synonyms (’whispered’, ‘murmured’, etc.) and two uses of ’said’, plus one ’said-bookism’ (’said, awed’). It became distracting. She also had an incredible number of sentences in the passive voice. It’s a novel, not an essay, so of course Melling is allowed to use passive voice, but it, again, distracted me. (”The pain was like a burn. The wind was knocked out of her.”)

When I mentioned above that Melling described each part of Ireland lovingly, I meant it. However, especially towards the beginning of the book, it felt to me as if the author was dumping a page or so of information about every single topic that came up in the book. I ended up skimming each infodump as I came across it, and I didn’t miss much. I do not know, however, if this was because the author had included too much information, or because I already knew a bit about each topic. I won’t say I’m well-versed in Celtic mythology, but with the number of fantasy novels that draw their inspiration from Ireland, I’m not entirely ignorant.

I’ve also been to Ireland, and so I’ve seen some of the places Melling has described. For a reader who is familiar with the terrain, this novel can be a wonderful recollection of some perfectly amazing places. Despite that, the flaws in the writing occasionally overwhelmed the enjoyment of the story. Additionally, a reader much less familiar with Celtic mythology might need, and appreciate, all the details regarding Faerie. A reader who has read, say, two or three books in the Urban Faerie subgenre, or any of the Celtic-based epic fantasy field, would be familiar enough to skim Melling’s detail. I’ll give it 3.5/5 stars, primarily for the plot.