TWILIGHT SOJOURN

by Marilyn Hailbronner ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 18, 2020

A romance novel in which a 20th-century woman finds love and peril 1,000 years in the past.

As Hailbronner’s novel (the first in her Shadows of Black Mountain series) opens, it’s 1960, and Mairwen Tanner is traveling from the south of England to her father’s cottage in Llawgwalch, Carmarthenshire, in back-of-beyond Wales. She’s making the trip after clearing out the house of her recently deceased mother, and she’s traveling alone. Her husband, Jack, has given an excuse for not joining her—an excuse she doesn’t believe (“He was involved with someone again,” she thinks, “another of the many affairs he had had over the years”). She’s visiting Wales to explore her family roots there for the first time in her life, and on the train ride into the Welsh countryside, the first strange thing occurs. She faints, and when she regains her senses, a big, charismatic man is helping her up. She doesn’t recognize him, and she’s struck by the fact that he calls her “fy cariad,” Welsh for “my love.” The stranger disappears, but Mairwen has other mysteries to contend with. Her father has disappeared, but he’s left behind a touching letter and the key to his cottage. Once she’s living in Llawgwalch, Mairwen begins to dream about the mysterious stranger, and the dreams are very informative: He’s Rhain ap Cunadda, a warrior sworn to the service of 11th-century Welsh warlord Rhys ap Tewdwr, and his life story keeps unfolding in Mairwen’s dreams. When those dreams suddenly become reality on Halloween, she finds herself face-to-face with the very flesh-and-blood Rhain in his dangerous world.

Fans of Diana Gabaldon’s bestselling Outlander series will find themselves in familiar territory almost immediately upon encountering Hailbronner’s opening premise: A modern-day woman in an unhappy marriage time travels to the earlier era of her one true love. Making Mairwen a longtime amateur student of Welsh history gives Hailbronner ample chance to work in the substantial amounts of exposition that this novel requires, some of which is also effectively managed by shifting the scene of action to the ancient past even before Mairwen travels there herself. Readers learn that the Irish King has laid claim to the Kingdom of Gwynedd in ancient Wales, and Rhys ap Tewdwr and his mercenary army, including the steadfast Rhain, are determined to fight. It’s hardly a world for a civilian from the 20th century, much less for burgeoning romance, but by throwing her main characters into shared danger before they even know each other, Hailbronner neatly encourages the reader to become invested. There’s a good deal of (breathless but evocative) atmosphere-setting prose: “Senses heightened, she had become aware of so much more; the faint smell of her own sweat, damp earth disturbed by their feet. So still, then the soft hoot of the owl again, but farther off.” As is customary in novels of this kind, Mairwen adapts almost instantly to life in the brutal past, which makes the events of the novel’s final act all the more wrenching—readers will be eager to follow this story to its next installment.

An involving time-travel romance in the hard days of medieval Wales.

Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2020

ISBN: 979-8676350178

Page Count: 506

Publisher: Self

Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2022

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

ROMANCE | TIME TRAVEL | FANTASY & SCI-FI ROMANCE