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A plain and practical butcher’s daughter, Foss is aware that nobody would ever want to win her heart—which keeps her safe from the magic-workers, who steal them to fuel their magic. But when a visiting sorcerer comes to her village, he Snags her heart and vanishes without a word, leaving Foss riddled with painful heartsickness.

Leaving behind a note to her beloved Da, Foss sets off to the city to make the sorcerer give her back her heart. But the sorcerer doesn’t recognize her and, in a panic, Foss lies and offers to become his housekeeper. It gives her a chance to look around the magical House for the heart she knows the sorcerer stole. The sorcerer, however, isn’t what she expected. Sylvester may be superhumanly beautiful, but he’s also sullen, lonely and unable to control his magic. He’s not like his sisters, who intentionally and continually steal human hearts, leaving their previous owners hollow. Can Foss undo the spell, help the other heart-Snagged humans and sort out her feelings for Sylvester—or will a poor, ordinary butcher’s daughter succumb to a pain she never thought she’d experience?

Poet and novelist Andrea Eames pays homage to modern fantasy classics like Naomi Novik’s Uprooted and the Studio Ghibli adaptation of Howl’s Moving Castle with A Harvest of Hearts. Eames doesn’t always hit the same peaks as those inspirations: Characters act exactly as expected from the moment they are introduced, and the world building is unique but inconsistent, with Foss’ questions about how magic works never being adequately answered. The finale is more focused on the emotional stakes of the romance than the actions of its characters, leaving the Big Bad to be quickly defeated by a Macguffin in order to devote more space to a cozy post-credits scene.

Foss struggles with body image issues, even though she knows that she likely isn’t the ugliest woman in the world—just normal compared to the supernaturally gorgeous magic-workers around her. Thankfully, her complicated romance with Sylvester doesn’t magically solve these issues. However, Sylvester, who doesn’t interact much with Foss through the first half of the book, doesn’t get as much page time as readers might like. Eames’ writing shines best with her side characters: Sylvester’s beautiful, villainous sister Clarissa will please a certain subset of readers that love a hot, evil woman. The magical shape-shifting House (and its strong opinions on sexy dresses) and talking cat Cornelius steal the show, endearing themselves to the readers with strong personalities and deep desire to help our heroes.

While imperfect, there is much to enjoy in A Harvest of Hearts, and this fantasy romance will satisfy fans of Alexandra Rowland and Rebecca Thorne.

Tess is an engineer. A good swimmer. A young woman with a life in California, sunshine and Silicon Valley. When she’s asked to return to her home island of Stenland, a “small rock between Scotland and the Arctic,” for her childhood best friend Linnea’s wedding, she assumes it will be no more than a blip in her schedule. A couple of days of PTO. 

But as A Curse for the Homesick unspools, it’s obvious Tess has unresolved history with Stenland. Years ago, she left behind her great love, Soren, among the Stennish caves and sheep pastures. Soren, with whom she’d felt the most like herself, to whom she’d devoted her most formative years. Soren, who before everything else, was a reminder of why she needed to leave. In a swish of magic reminiscent of Maggie Stiefvater’s The Scorpio Races, the island of Stenland is cursed. Every so often, and without warning, a few Stennish women are marked with three black lines across their foreheads, becoming “skelds.” For the month the lines remain, anyone who makes eye contact with a skeld will turn to stone. Soren and Tess have been inextricably bound since their elementary school days, when Tess’ mother turned Soren’s parents to stone during her skeld season. Growing up in the dark shadow of the curse, of how it killed, Tess was adamant to never be a skeld, to never stay. When she fell for Soren, who loves Stenland, she knew it was star-crossed. 

But once she’s back on the island for Linnea’s wedding, Tess and Soren meet again. A Curse for the Homesick is above all a second-chance romance, and author Laura Brooke Robson does a phenomenal job mixing flashbacks with scenes in the present, following Tess’ journey from a young girl into adulthood. We see her with Soren, but also with her dear friends Linnea and Kitty. We watch her navigate what it means to grow up, to grow into or out of a place, to choose between escaping and accepting a complicated past. Robson writes with simple elegance, and her book is not only a devoted character study, it is a love letter to her gorgeous fictional setting of Stenland: the wind, the cairns, the old towers; the ice cream spot and Hedda’s, the only coffee shop; the concrete swimming pool and the claustrophobia of a small town. This grounded, moving novel is a perfect rainy day read and an ode to what it is to be human—to desire and gain, to desire and lose, to find again.