#A River Enchanted

Currently Reading Currently at: 45% For people who like: fae, magical mysteries, and magic systems that have high costs.

Time for a Reading Post™️! I finished A River Enchanted by Rebecca Ross for book club. Probably going to be a short post as I don’t have anything super interesting to say about the book. A River Enchanted is about divided clans on a magical island where spirits of the land are real and hold power. The story follows Jack Tamerlaine as he is summoned back to the island from studying music on the mainland. Jack quickly learns he’s been brought back because little girls are being kidnapped and the Tamerlaine leadership believes it to be the work of spirits. How is Jack involved? Obviously, playing music magically can summon spirits, of course! Along the way, we meet a lot of folks and learn about the historic feud between the Tamerlaines and the Breccans. As Jack works with the Tamerlaine heiress, Adaira, to find the missing girls, love blossoms in the air for them. Now, spoilers here so skip to the next paragraph if you don’t want them. A River Enchanted is a duology, so OBVIOUSLY the book ends with bad things happening. We learn that the Breccans are kidnapping the girls because Adaira was actually a Breccan child, taken from them as a baby. Adaira is forced to leave with the Breccans as a trade for punishing Moray, the Breccan responsible for the kidnappings. She and Jack are separated and there is a lot we don’t know about how the spirits are involved and what they ultimately want. Okay, synopsis given, time for my thoughts. This book was good. I don’t have any major criticisms of the content, the way it was written, the plot, etc. On the flip side, this book wasn’t mind blowing either. It did its job as a fantasy with romance subplots, but it didn’t make me see the genre in a whole new light or anything. If the above synopsis sounded good to you, you’ll probably end up liking this book! My synopsis here doesn’t get into the themes of the book, like what do home, family, and faith, really mean, or how cycles of violence are harmful to all and breaking them is difficult but important. This book certainly has thoughts and opinions on those topics and handles them well enough! Overall, I gave this an 4/5 (8/10) on Story graph. I’m going to use this space to make a quick complaint about the Story graph and Goodreads rating systems. Because we live in a stupid, capitalistic hellscape, MOST books on these platforms have a rating somewhere between 3.5 to 4.5. These tools are public forums and it is well known that both authors and publishers are on the apps and take the ratings heavily into consideration. That said, we now have the Uber problem. If I didn’t like a book, and I give it the 1.5/5 I feel it deserves in my heart, I’m potentially hurting the author’s livelihood. Just like in an Uber, you end up rating highly just to help the person out. For me, this has led to my rating scale being 3, 4, or 5 out of 5, instead of an actual 1-5 scale. Now, I fully intend to work on this and give books my full honest rating here in these posts. That said, A River Enchanted is probably more like a 3.5/5 (7/10) for me. I liked it, but it wasn’t my favorite book by any stretch of the imagination and I’m probably never going to reread it. Anyway, with that out of the way, the next book club book is Jade City by Fonda Lee. I’m also going to TRY and finish Empire of the Dawn by Jay Kristoff AND Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann. Getting all of this done by next book club in January will be a huge task for me BUT I am about to be on leave for two weeks around Christmas and New Year’s. That said, Persona 3 Reload has been consuming my every waking thought at the moment, sooooooo unless that wraps up shortly, I will most likely be playing that instead of reading. XD

I’m currently reading a river enchanted, and I’m enjoying whatever is going on between torin and sidra more than the main leads😔🩷 Yes, I broke the rules by looking through fanarts before finishing the book.. but nothing spoiled, so yay!🧚‍♀️🎀

“The days may be dark but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t feel joy.” A River Enchanted / Rebecca Ross

A River Enchanted This book unironically reminded me why I love reading, it was such a beautiful story that intertwines music and life and folklore, I could only think about how could it would be as a TV series. It follows our main characters as they try to figure out why the girls of their people are being kidnapped, so they summon the spirits of the island to try and find some answers, while also battling with the west of the island, where they life long enemies live. It’s such a good book, please read it. 🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 4.25/5 stars

Genre: Fiction, Adult, Romantasy Rating: 4 out of 5 Content Warning: Kidnapping, Violence, Blood, Death of parent, Death, Injury/Injury detail, Sexual content, Miscarriage, Infertility Summary: Jack Tamerlaine hasn’t set foot on Cadence in ten long years, content to study music at the mainland university. But when young girls start disappearing from the isle, Jack is summoned home to help find them. Enchantments run deep on Cadence: gossip is carried by the wind; plaid shawls can be as strong as armor, and the smallest cut of a knife can instil fathomless fear. The capricious spirits that rule the isle by fire, water, earth, and wind find mirth in the lives of the humans who call the land home. Adaira, heiress of the east and Jack’s childhood enemy, knows the spirits only answer to a bard’s music, and she hopes Jack can draw them forth by song, enticing them to return the missing girls. As Jack and Adaira reluctantly work together, they find they make better allies than rivals as their partnership turns into something more. But with each passing song, it becomes apparent the trouble with the spirits is far more sinister than they first expected, and an older, darker secret about Cadence lurks beneath the surface, threatening to undo them all. *Opinions* One of the prompts for the reading challenges I am doing this year was to read a book with the word “river” in the title. Somehow with my 180-book physical TBR, I did not have a book that had the word ‘river’, so to Libby I went. I had read Rebecca Ross before, but wasn’t sure what to expect from this tale of magic and music. What I found was a quiet tale about people and how they deal with grief, loss, love, and attempting to find their place in the world. A River Enchanted follows Jack Tamerlaine, a man who has not been home for over eleven years after being sent to the mainland to study music. His home of Cadence is full of magic and the Folk of water, earth, fire, and air. It also holds Adaria, the heirless of the East, and Jack’s tormentor as a child. They have to put old feelings and rivalries aside when girls on the island start to go missing, and Adaria needs Jack’s music to help her reach out to the folk. As Adaria and Jack navigate their relationship as adults, they find that perhaps they are not as different as they once believed. Torrin, the leader of the East watch, feels the burden of the missing girls and fear for his own five-year-old daughter. As he spends more and more time away from home, Sidra, his second wife, grapples with everything that is happening on the island and with her position in the family she joined. As more girls go missing and secrets start to unravel everything that generations have been brought up on, Jack, Adaria, Sidra, and Torrin will do anything to make sure that the missing girls come back safe. This story definitely has a fairytale and musical quality to it, much like the songs that Jack plays on his harp. Between the folk being very much a character in this story and the way that the island itself is a character, this is reminiscent of ballads of old. Yet, instead of being focused on epic battles or heroes of old, this is a quiet story about people attempting to do their best for themselves and their community. While there are very serious themes, missing children, the death of loved ones, finding community and purpose, there is this sense of calm over the entire story. If you are expecting an epic, you will be disappointed, but if you ever wondered what happened to the normal people during all those tales, this is a story you will enjoy. In the author’s note, Ross stated that she came up with the island of Cadence before any of the characters, and it is obvious by the loving way that she describes all areas of the island. The way that the ground shifts itself to help people move quickly or make them lose their way if they aren’t on the enchanted paths makes the island alive. Ross based the island on Scotland, and it was easy to impose the flora and fauna over pictures I have seen of that country. It will be interesting to see how the West, which is only discussed in this novel, will look when we see it in the next novel. The magic is a living thing as well, and while it is more of a vibe-based magic system, it is clear that there is a price and danger to harnessing the magic of Cadence. There are two romance tropes in this novel: childhood enemies to lovers and a marriage of convenience, and I think that Ross does them both well. I make the distinction of childhood enemies because Jack and Adaira find common footing pretty early into their reunion. The way that neither one of them wants to admit that they care about one another was not annoying in some novels, and just a small part of the overall plot. I also just loved that a bard was a main character because it does not happen as much as I personally think it should. Ross navigated Sidra and Torrin’s relationship well, both of them being people outside of the relationship they formed. Both of their insecurities made perfect sense and are not dragged out to the point of annoyance. I really enjoyed both of the romances that Ross starts in this novel, and I am interested to see how they end. Overall, I was surprised how much I liked this novel and even enjoyed it more than Divine Rivals, which everyone was talking about a couple of years ago. This is a 4-star read, and I am interested to see how Ross presents the themes that she focused on in this novel.

ALT Have you read A River Enchanted by Rebecca Ross (2022)? yes no I didn’t finish it I’ve never heard of it See Results

“But alas, hearts are made to be broken, aren’t they, bard?” “If they must break, then they break and remake themselves into stronger vessels.” A River Enchanted / Rebecca Ross

onyx’s midweek musings happy new month everyone! here are my midweek musings… Words: 977 words Read Time: 5 minutes Cozy Gaming It’s been so long since I’ve gotten a chance to update you all on The Sims! This week we’re checking in with the Sardonis Family, my first legacy family (though I broke the rules and had them start off pretty well-off.) Anthony and Mele seem to be very happy together in their new life as… View On WordPress

Torrin hated every time she said sorry. Sidra took responsibility for too many things, and he worried it would break her one day. A River Enchanted by Rebecca Ross

Judge a book by its first line: A River Enchanted (Elements of Cadence 1) by Rebecca Ross

A River Enchanted Summary Unlock the Secrets of Cadence’s Enchanted Isle Unlock Magic & Mystery: Your Riveting A River Enchanted Summary Ever felt the pull of a place you thought you’d left behind? Imagine being summoned back to a home shrouded in ancient magic and bitter feuds, your only weapon… a harp. That’s the gripping reality facing Jack Tamerlaine in A River Enchanted, the breathtaking first book of Rebecca Ross’s Elements of Cadence series. This A River… A River Enchanted Summary Unlock the Secrets of Cadence’s Enchanted Isle

Rebecca Ross why do you seek to cause me pain

she wondered if a girl could become a tree, no longer aging in mortal ways but by seasons. could a girl become a wildflower patch, resurrected every spring and summer only to wilt and fade come the sting of frost? could she become the foam of the sea that rolled over the coast for an eternity, or a flame that danced in a hearth? a winged being of the wind, sighing over the hills? - rebecca ross, a river enchanted

Genres: Magic, faerie, young adult Rating: 3/5 I told myself I would take a break from East Asian influenced magic. Only to go a little too far into faux-British Isles period folklore fantasy. It’s a refreshing break, but not the type of fantasy I was gunning for and so I’m approaching this with some bias against it. Jack Tamerlaine has been summoned back to his home, the isle Cadence where magic and spirits still roam wild, at the behest of his laid, Alistair Tamerlaine of the East. He soon realizes he was tricked into returning, by his childhood frenemy the heiress Adaira, to secretly broker peaceful trade between the East and West of Cadence, who have long been at war. At the same time, young girls in the East have been going missing, and only Jack can find them, using his music studies as a bard and testing his own magic to summon the spirits and find answers that no one on the isle knew about or wanted revealed. It’s a detriment for me, to be distracted this entire book thinking about Scottish people. Parritch, plaid, lass, all of these words jar me into reality and so I guess I have to associate this Scot-like culture to Cadence’s East. At a certain point in the book, I realize that the West is Irish. So…uhm…as a non-British person with limited knowledge of English origin and history, I assume that…English isn’t a thing??? Utterly distracted. The mystery aspect was engaging, but not consuming. Again, a nice break from the drama into something uncomplicated and predictable. While the book focuses primarily on the characters and their motivations, I do wish there was just a little bit more on the societal tensions within the clan, with the spirits, with the mainland, and between the two sides of Cadence. I feel that there were also unnecessarily characters we were following. The story here is mainly about Adaira and Jack, but why are we also following Frae, Torin, and Sidra as if they have any huge role to play in the story? They’re there as Jack and Adaira’s substitute body parts and play some minor roles in driving the story and mystery along, but I hardly think that warrants actually seeing everything happen through their eyes. I did mention I was biased against this book. However, I find the story and writing pleasing so I plan to read the next book as well. April 2026 Reread To answer my previous questions about why we have to follow Torin, Sidra, and Maisie, I think the answer primarily comes in a form of “we need solid character development and that’s not really happening with Jack and Adaira." They develop, they mature, but not at the exponential rate that Torin and Sidra’s stunted and repressed relationship changes. In addition, we need to know Torin and his motivations. We need to be comfortable with this government-changing decision. And I suppose, it sets up the next book, if we’re aiming for a split POV of events between the east and the west. I think I’m impressed that the first suspect was the correct suspect responsible for kidnapping girls. It was kind of justified, based on the perpetrator’s background. Fitting in the backstory with the birth of Jack and his family is a nice touch, utterly for romantic purposes. Having starting to read Divine Rivals , Rebecca Ross sure likes to write forbidden romance, huh? Elements of Cadence 2: A Fire Endless review

That random haggis may have been a little on the nose. 2025 Reading Journal July 29 Book 58 Rebecca Ross A River Enchanted Elements of Cadence 1 ALT

REBECCA ROSS HOW DARE YOU WRITE THIS AND THEN END THE BOOK LIKE YOU DID??????