THE CROSSING: ARLAN’S PLEDGE BOOK ONE
A WARRIOR FIGHTING HIS DESTINY
A WOMAN DESPERATELY SEEKING HERS
AND A MAGICAL PORTAL THAT JOINS THEM BOTH
Dal Cruinne is a world of warriors and mages, clan kings and sages. Asleep since the Dragon Wars of millennia past, the beast have now awoken.
Arlan, warrior son of the High King of the Sovereignty of Dal Geadhle, is destined to be the war chief of his clan. But the cost is a future that ignores his desire to choose his own path.
Scottish librarian, Rhiannon, adrift after losing her job due to economic cuts, now lives a second-rate life, feeling more out of place than ever. When Arlan bursts into her world on his war horse and brandishing weapons, he turns her existence up-side-down.
He thinks he’s found the perfect woman. She can’t understand why he’s delaying his return.
Now with his world on the brink of war, and Rhiannon challenging his attitudes, Arlan must choose between his growing feelings for her and his responsibilities to his people.
Will the call of his home world be stronger, and is her desire to fight beside him even possible?
A 5-STAR REVIEW By Author Elizabeth Klein
It took me several weeks to read this magnificent tale, not because it was arduous. Rather, I had to set the rich words down and walk away…and breathe again, since it had captured my soul entirely. It felt like my heart beat right alongside Rhiannon’s when that impossible moment materialised in her mundane life in the form of Arlan Finnbar MacEnoicht.I had to let those pages breathe their superlative magic through me, leagues deep; somehow divine and perilously surpassing in every way.
The Crossingis everything the romantic-starved, portal-loving, fantasy reader craves, resplendent like finely-spun gold in its execution by its masterful author, Jenn Lees. The story is multi-faceted, grounded in several characters’ unique lives, not just Rhiannon’s—the main protagonist—each one adding their own rich, syrupy flavour to the overall plot created by Lees.
I won’t disclose the myriad treasures this story possesses, though I loved Arlan. Who wouldn’t want to ride off with him, back through the elusive portal to his own world, where awaited a tapestry-gilt life of perils, mages with altogether too much power and the odd dragon no one knew existed that could melt even rock with its furnace breath? I’ll put my hand up. Perhaps buried within me is the notion that maybe portals into fantastical worlds really do exist. Scottish people seem touched by such otherworldly ideas that we only dream or read about, and Lees gives pen to this unique heartbeat to create a poignant tale of love.
I was charmed and captivated as I slipped easily between the worlds within the pages, for I became a time traveller on a journey seeking love and adventure like Rhiannon, themes that sparkle in The Crossinglike finely-cut crystal in sunlight. The book is well-researched and beautifully narrated so that I, too, felt the cold Scottish winds in my hair and the wild lashing of rain against my cheeks. Lees, a masterful storyteller, wove her own peculiar magic through a rich brocade of description and imagination to create believable reality drawn from the misty past of the Scottish Highlands.
‘s math a rinn thu.