Four years ago, I learned the rules of romance writing. There are two very important requirements for a story to be considered a romance:
- The main plot must center around the relationship between the love interests.
- It must end with a Happily Ever After or Happy For Now.
I struggled with rule #2 for about a year (check out how I overcame that in a previous blog post), but once accepted, I had a big question: How do you make this work with ghosts? If one half of the couple is a living person, and the other half is a ghost, how are they going to have an HEA?
Part of my confusion came from reading an incorrectly labeled paranormal romance. First off, the main plot was not the relationship with the (ghost) love interest; that ended up being the side plot. Second, the main character is not reunited with their ghost love interest until decades after the main story ends when they die of old age (think the reunited scene of Jack and Rose in Titanic). That didn’t really feel like an HEA to me.
So, like the emotional teenager I sometimes act like, I stayed away from ghost stories until Bound Across Time by Annie R. McEwen fell into my lap. This is a paranormal romance worth reading.
Let’s start with our living character, our female main character: Celeste Gowdie (a.k.a. CeCe). CeCe’s mother died when she was young, and she was raised by her aunts in the U.S. state of Georgia. CeCe doesn’t know who her father is (this is important for one of the reveals toward the end). She studied history in college, and is working in St. Rhydian’s castle in Wales when the story begins. CeCe wants to be taken seriously as a real historian, but she ends up being the American tour guide who gets to research and share ghost stories to the patrons.
Patrick O’Loinsigh is the bastard son of one of the historic Lords of the castle. He was born in Ireland in the 18th Century, educated in Paris, and forced to move to his father’s castle during his early adult years. His father used him to do his dirty work since Patrick wouldn’t be inheriting the title. Patrick is murdered by his half brother, and his spirit spends the next few centuries hanging out in the in-between waiting for the living soul who matches a prophecy meant to free him.
Patrick and CeCe have a meet-cute of epic proportions. Patrick lures CeCe to the top of the tallest tower by turning on a battery operated candle. CeCe can’t lock up the castle and go home until all lights are turned off. So after a literal hike, CeCe comes across a handsome man in 1700s clothing. Patrick scares CeCe so bad that she faints.
It takes CeCe several days to believe Patrick that he is the ghost of the handsome man in the gallery of the castle’s historic inhabitants. At first she thinks he’s a loiter pretending to be Patrick O’Loinsigh. But when she finally believes him, she falls, and she falls hard.
The local witch coven gets involved, CeCe’s aunts get involved because… family secrets! (That I’m not going to spoil.) Everyone wants CeCe to stay away from Patrick for her own good. Of course she doesn’t listen, and she embarks on a passionate and steamy love affair with Patrick.
Well, it turns out that when a living person spends that kind of time with a ghost, their literal being starts to disappear. So now, CeCe and Patrick have a difficult decision to make: go their separate ways to save CeCe’s life, or research if magic can help them.
And that’s where I’m going to leave you with this story, because you’re just going to have to read it yourself if you want to know how it ends. But the ending is soooooo worth the emotional turmoil that Ms. McEwen is going to put you through.
These kinds of stories always have to have “rules of magic” and the rules of magic that Annie created were very cool. When Patrick and CeCe meet up, the room they are in reverts back to the way it was when Patrick was alive. When Patrick leaves, the room returns to its modern-day look and feel. When they are together, they are neither in the past nor present – though they are closer to the present, because humans could hear CeCe if they came by the room.
There also appears to be two different “types” of magic. There’s a traditional witch who can cast spells and make potions and such. Then there are people born with “gifts”. CeCe is born with a gift that allows her to see and hear Patrick in the first place. (For more details on that, read the book!)
And to finish off this review, here is a Q&A with the author herself:
In your planning, what came first: a story about witches? Or a story about ghosts?
Door Number Three: a story about a castle! Because, when I conceived the book, I was living in a small Welsh town that is graced by a very old and beautiful castle. I spent a lot of time thinking about the people who passed through those halls and gardens. Were any of them still there? So, yes, I suppose the ghosts came first and everything else followed.
What historical people, places and facts are true? What did you embellish or fill in the holes?
The town, the witches, the historian who’s forced to resort to ghost walks since history doesn’t sell, the castle, the stone circle a few miles out of town, the Welsh coast almost within sight of Ireland, the family who kept secrets, the work of people – archivists, admins, docents, conservationists – at an historic site: all those are fact-based, along with the many casually dropped references to and stories about the past as viewed by both a modern historian and a ghost who died in the mid-1700s. Beyond and embracing those is the truth of protagonist CeCe’s life and work; just like her, I’m a career historian who lived in a small Welsh town and met the astoundingly warm and quirky inhabitants, worked in the local castle, visited the stone circle. The things I changed were the ghost (whom I never met, more’s the pity) and the names and actions of both CeCe and the locals. Oh, and the color-changing cat! Always wanted one of those but, alas, mine have all been the single-color variety.
I’m guessing Aiofe’s story is next? Do you also plan on going back in time and also telling Gabrielle’s story?
Bound to Happen (Book Two of the Bound Series) does indeed follow Aoife/Fee’s story. It involves a radical change in setting, from a tiny Welsh town to London and, specifically, Covent Garden, where Aoife has a grant to research playwrights and poets of the 1600s. She’s lured to an abandoned theater by some urban exploring chums and…Well, you’ll have to read the novel to see what happens then! But in addition to new and very different secondary characters – Aoife’s Ghana-born flatmate and her ancestor priestess Mom, along with some skeptical folks in the National Trust and Museum of London Archeology – characters from Book One re-appear, like Jana Smithbury-Tewkes (and her new color-changing feline, Rumpelstiltskin.) Through them, readers learn more about Fee’s Savannah family (still keeping secrets, as families do) and her life growing up with leathling-souler parents in 18th century Paris. As to Gabrielle Gowdie: while bits of her tale are woven into Bound to Happen, it’s in Boundless (Book Three of the series), that we hear from an aging Helene Gowdie (oldest of the original five sisters who included Gabrielle) about why and how the secret-keeping of Gowdie family began.
What’s next for your writing career?
More writing, more publishing! I’m contracted with four publishers (one in the UK, the rest US-based) for nine books, five of which are written, the rest in progress. I’m eager to push ahead with my series for the UK publisher, Bloodhound Books; it’s Victorian working class romance centered on the lives and loves of four women who work in a London corset workshop. If you liked Peaky Blinders, you’ll love The Corset Girls! I haven’t left paranormal romance behind, though; I’ve got a spine-chilling vampire romance story in Rowan Prose Publishing’s horror anthology coming out later this year. And I’m finishing a time travel historical romance set in 1910 Boston, New Orleans, and Wales. Several other WIPs are nudging me for attention, including a Regency romance comedy about the lengths to which an impoverished heiress will go to avoid an inconvenient marriage, an 1880s romance set in New Orleans’ back streets, and a novel of smuggling and love on the Kent coast in the 1740s.
Annie R. McEwen has written a beautiful romance that brings past and present together in the most captivating of ways. She kept me guessing until the very end how the problems would get resolved. Very captivating and well-earned five stars.
Chelsey M. Ortega 