Review by Kelly Jarvis: Smoke, Steel, and Ivy by Amy Trent

Smoke, Steel, & Ivy is the first book in Amy Trent’s Enchantment Retold Collection, and it will transport you to the space of Once Upon a Time. The novel opens with Ivy, the eldest daughter of a newly-remarried King Rupert, telling her little sister a fairy tale. Ivy is one of twelve sisters, known in traditional fairy tales as The Twelve Dancing Princesses, and she has a lot of responsibility on her shoulders. When King Rupert arranges a contest to choose an heir to marry one of his daughters, Ivy is put under even more pressure because she has already fallen in love with a common soldier named Major Collin. In order to protect her sisters from bad marriages and find her happily-ever-after with the man she loves, Ivy must depend on both the magic she encounters in the world and the magic she stores in her heart.

Trent’s Enchantment Retold Collection is much more than a series of fairy tale retellings. Trent examines lesser known tales in her work, following her Twelve Dancing Princesses inspired novel with retellings of Kate Crackernuts in Clever, Cursed, and Storied and tales of kind and unkind girls in Curses, Diamonds, and Toads. Trent’s characters are engaging and her narratives will keep readers turning the page, but she excels at her examination of the power of storytelling itself. In Smoke, Steel, & Ivy, Trent has created a contemporary heroine struggling with traditional restrictions, and she sweeps readers into her fairy tale world with a sweet romance that will leave them wanting to know more about the enchanted landscape she has created.

Smoke, Steel & Ivy will steal your heart, and when you finish it, the second and third installments in Amy Trent’s series will be waiting for you. I loved this book! You can find it here. And you can read my review of Clever, Cursed, and Storied here.

Kelly Jarvis is the Contributing Writer for The Fairy Tale Magazine. Her work has also been featured in A Moon of One’s Own, Baseball Bard, Blue Heron Review, Corvid Queen, Eternal Haunted Summer, Forget Me Not Press, Mermaids Monthly, The Chamber Magazine, The Magic of Us, and the World Weaver Press Anthology Mothers of Enchantment: New Tales of Fairy Godmothers. Her first novella, Selkie Moon, comes out in 2025. You can connect with her on Facebook (Kelly Jarvis, Author) or Instagram (@kellyjarviswriter) or find her at https://kellyjarviswriter.com/