Mya is a gothic historical novel with a real feel for texture: wet cobbles, gaslight, apothecary glass, winter hedgerows, lecture halls, churchyards, and drawing rooms that seem to breathe on the page. It opens in 1883 Liverpool and London, but it keeps one foot in older, deeper folklore, so the book reads like a meeting point between Victorian medicine, old-world myth, and a love story that knows from the start that tenderness can be dangerous. What struck me first was how confidently the novel understands its own atmosphere. It isn’t just dark for the sake of being dark. It builds a whole emotional climate around secrecy, restraint, ritual, and longing.

At the center is Mya herself, and the book works because she isn’t treated as a puzzle to be solved so much as a person who has spent centuries managing survival with discipline, intelligence, and grief. Her connection with William Ashbury gives the novel its emotional shape. He’s a doctor drawn to botanical medicine and careful observation, and their conversations let the book become a romance of ideas as much as a romance of feeling. One of the smartest lines in the novel is, “Forward does not always mean away.” That sentence isn’t just about medicine. It’s the book’s whole philosophy. Mya keeps asking whether modernity actually means wisdom, whether buried knowledge still matters, and whether care can exist without control.

What I liked most is that the supernatural material is woven into the novel’s deeper concerns instead of sitting on top of them. The wolf mythology, Mya’s tincture, and William’s medical curiosity all feed the same question: what does it mean to live with a force inside you that can’t be cured, only understood imperfectly? That gives the story a surprising amount of emotional seriousness. Even when the book moves into danger, pursuit, and revelation, it stays grounded in questions of mercy, containment, loneliness, and bodily cost. There’s also a really appealing thread about lost knowledge and dismissed healers, crystallized in William’s beautiful line, “And that space… is where medicine lives.”

The prose is often lush, but it usually earns that lushness because the novel is so committed to sensation: scent, sound, weather, fabric, breath, animal unease, the pressure of silence in a room. Music matters here too, not as decoration, but as part of the novel’s emotional architecture. The result is a book that feels composed rather than merely plotted. Scene by scene, it keeps returning to the same tonal register of ache, beauty, and suspended threat, and that consistency gives the later chapters real weight. By the time the story reaches its final movement, the tragedy feels not imposed but grown from everything the novel has been quietly building all along.

Mya is a romantic gothic novel about survival, intimacy, and the cost of carrying an old violence through a modern world. It’s rich in setting, unusually tender toward its heroine, and genuinely interested in the overlap between science, folklore, and moral choice. More than anything, it’s a book about a woman who has mastered endurance and then dares, briefly and painfully, to imagine a future larger than endurance. That gives the ending its sting, but also its grace. I finished it feeling that the novel had delivered exactly what it promised from its opening pages: fog, firelight, danger, music, and a love story haunted by history yet fully alive in the present of its telling.

Pages: 282 | ASIN: B0GTB1JZ5F