Rook's Time, by Kim Fielding (Carnival of Mysteries)

[Ulysses]

Rating: 5 stars
Review By Ulysses Dietz, Member of the Paranormal Romance Guild Review Team
Name of Book: Rook’s Time
Series: Carnival of Mysteries (year 2)
Author: Kim Fielding
Publisher: Tin Box Press
Release date: 2024
Page Count: 315
Genre: paranormal m/m

It seems unfair to tag this as a romance—although a great love story is its foundation. It is an adventure, with a paranormal motif running strongly throughout (shifters, magical time travel). However, it is really a psychological study of a young man whom we’ve met before, in Kim Fielding’s first book for this series, “Crow’s Fate.” This is Simeon Bell, whose real name and extremely complicated family history we discover as the book opens before us. He was really important in the first book, but we never got to know him.

Crow Rapp is important, for sure. The tall, blond, 20th-century farm boy is Simeon’s anchor. Their love sustains both of them in this adventure, in which they decide to leave the security of Mr. Ame’s Carnival of Mysteries in order to find out the truth of Simeon’s life ‘before.’ In this book Crow steps back, and lets the author’s light shine on his beloved.

The series last year established the Carnival’s purpose: to go where and when it was needed. Issues of fate and self-determination are always part of these stories, but especially here, in Kim Fielding’s beautifully written explorations of free will and destiny. Interestingly, this book spends less time looking at the details of the Carnival of Mysteries itself, and focuses more on its whole. The Carnival saved both Crow and Simeon; but it also brought them together, and ultimately helps them leave its sheltering community in order to find truth. Familiar details make the Carnival like an old friend we’re revisiting, but the point of this book is to be found elsewhere.

Simeon Bell is as rich and endearing a character as any in Dickens (and I’ve read all of Dickens). A lot of this story takes place in Victorian England, which is not something Crow anticipated when he fell in love with the ailing British lad from some other time.

Fielding does her homework, and gives the past settings a three-dimensional believability that helps drag the reader head-first into a pretty hair-raising plotline. I particularly loved Mr. and Mrs. Frugis, who are presented as both weird and comforting. They are very clearly paranormal, and yet feel entirely apt to the England of the 1870s and 80s they inhabit in the course of the story. I can’t dwell much on them without spoiling the fun—but they are important, and embody the kind of rich detail that brings the story to life as the two young men risk everything without quite knowing what they need to find.

It all comes back to the Carnival, where once again Miss Persephone offers sage advice, that may or may not be magical, and is (as usual) not entirely clear. Life is like that. We choose our path, never knowing where the paths we did not choose might have taken us.

It’s a really good book, and an auspicious start to the second go at this inventive series.