The Gods Time Forgot
The book begins with an intriguing premise: What if the Irish gods, creatures of vast appetites and uncontrollable passions, were forced to move among the highly codified social circles of Gilded Age New York? In a Hudson Valley estate, Rua awakens in a woodland pond with no memory of who she is, but the wealthy Harrington family claims she is their missing daughter, Emma. When the Harringtons bring her to make her debut in New York City, Rua is passionately drawn to a wealthy Irishman, the Lord of Donore. Their mutual passion leads them into scandalous behavior in both society hostesses’ ballrooms and the back alleys of New York. The lovers’ behavior is so implausible that Gilded Age society feels like a theater backdrop rather than an actual historical setting.
The mythos that underlies the lovers’ fatal attraction is equally poorly drawn, consisting largely of vague references to a doomed love affair between the Irish triple goddess of death, the Morrigan, and Finn McCool, the great Irish hero. Taken on its own terms, the novel is an intriguing romantasy involving a headstrong heroine who doesn’t understand her own powers. But the author’s decision to set the story in an actual historical time and place, as well as using a well-known mythological cycle as a secondary context, diminishes the novel’s effectiveness considerably.
