Wildsong by Catherine Creel

 

WILDSONG is a medieval romance set in Ireland that I picked up impulsively at a thrift shop. As far medieval romances go, it's pretty tame. There's some talk about what dickheads the English are, but the focus of the story is on the romance between the Irish Ceara and Sir Brian, the English knight who has been given an Irish castle to manage. Manage probably isn't the right word, but basically, if the king was the CEO of the United Kingdom, I feel like the knights and lords in his favor basically ended up being general managers of the lands he gave them.

Anyway, the hero and the heroine meet when he sees her playing her harp in the woods one night. And he's like HAWT. And then they kiss. There's several more encounters like that, despite the statutes of Kilkenny, which basically say, "No listening to Irish music, no fucking Irish chicks, etc." Sir Brian doesn't care for your rules, ENGLAND.

I liked this romance, okay? It's cute and sweet, and yeah, not very historically accurate. Everyone's clean and there's no breath of plague and the cruelest thing one of the English dudes does is try to force himself on Ceara like a drunken frat boy, but that is resolved with no consequence. Maybe I've been reading too many old skool bodice-rippers, but I kept bracing for some sort of grand villain finale. Even the thing with the OM, Padraig, Ceara's ex-fiancee, felt anticlimactic.

I'd recommend this to people who like the vibes of medieval romance but not the realism. If you want the Medieval Times/Disney version of a medieval romance, this is your jam. Very little violence, no OW drama, a cute secondary romance, and pretty tepid acts of villainy. Also, it has a beautiful stepback, which I'll be sharing to Instagram later. It's the H and the h in a moonlit glade!

3.5 out of 5 stars