(Beyond the Faerie Rath Book 1)
By Hanna Park
From the very first pages, The Scald Crow feels less like a straightforward paranormal romance and more like stepping into a landscape where something old is quietly waiting. Ireland is not simply a setting here — it feels watchful, layered, and deeply rooted in stories that have never quite faded.
What makes the opening chapters so effective is how grounded they are in Calla herself. We meet her not as someone powerful or assured, but as a woman carrying the weight of a past she has not fully come to terms with. There’s a sense of dislocation about her — as though she has never entirely belonged anywhere — and that feeling follows her into Ireland. The inheritance that brings her there feels less like an opportunity and more like a pull, something drawing her into a life she does not yet understand.
Her early experiences are marked by a growing unease. Strange perceptions, moments that don’t quite align with reality, and an awareness that something is shifting just beneath the surface. These are not presented as dramatic shocks, but as quiet disturbances — the kind that are easy to dismiss at first, until they begin to accumulate. That slow build is what gives the novel its atmosphere. It never rushes to explain itself, allowing uncertainty to linger.
Colm enters the story within this unsettled space, and his presence immediately adds both warmth and tension. He is grounded in the world Calla has stepped into — connected to place, to family, to history — in a way she is not. Their dynamic works because of that contrast. Where Calla is uncertain and searching, Colm is steady, but not untouched by his own past. There is a weight to him, a sense of things unresolved, which makes their connection feel less like coincidence and more like something inevitable.
What develops between them is immediate, but not shallow. The intensity of their relationship mirrors the wider story — instinctive, difficult to explain, and not entirely within their control. It grows alongside the strange pull of the world around them, so that emotional and supernatural elements become increasingly difficult to separate.
As the novel progresses, the scope of the story begins to widen. What starts as a personal narrative — a woman dealing with an inheritance and her own uncertainty — gradually reveals itself to be something much larger. The questions Calla is asking about her present begin to lead backwards, into history, into identity, and into a version of the world where myth is not separate from reality.
Importantly, these revelations do not bring clarity so much as they bring complexity. Each answer shifts Calla’s understanding of herself, often in ways that are destabilising rather than empowering. Her journey is not about stepping neatly into a new role, but about adjusting to the knowledge that her life has never been as simple as she believed.
Running alongside this is a strong sense of place. The novel uses Irish folklore not as decoration, but as foundation. It shapes the tone of the story, the behaviour of its characters, and the boundaries of what is possible. There is a constant sense that the modern world sits lightly on top of something much older, and that Calla is beginning to slip between the two.
The emotional core of the story remains in its relationships. Not just the central romance, but the connections to family, to community, and to the past. These relationships are often complicated, shaped by things left unsaid or only partially understood. That gives the story a quiet weight, even in its more fantastical moments.
By the final chapters, the novel has shifted again. What began as a story of uncertainty and discovery becomes something more open-ended, as though the ground beneath the narrative has expanded. There is a sense of movement rather than resolution — of doors opening rather than closing.
It’s this balance — between intimacy and scale, between the personal and the mythological — that makes The Scald Crow stand out. It allows its story to unfold gradually, trusting the reader to sit with its uncertainty and follow where it leads.
Rather than offering neat answers, it leaves you with the feeling that this is only the beginning of something much larger — and that Calla’s story is far from over.
This novel is available to purchase HERE.
Hanna Park
`I began my writing career in the pre-dawn of a winter morning while my husband snored like a train. We could call my husband the catalyst. If it weren’t for him, I would never have gone to the kitchen to make a pot of coffee, feed the cat, and sit on the loveseat in front of the fire. It was there, in those moments of wondrous quiet, that I did something I had never thought possible. I opened my laptop, and while the coffee went cold, I wrote a story. My husband had no idea that these sojourns to the loveseat in front of the fire would become a daily occurrence, that writing would become an obsession, but the cat knew. She knows everything.
I write stories that make you laugh, make you cry, and make you love. Thank you, friends, for reading!
In the beginning, there was an empty page.
I am a writer who lives in Muskoka, Canada, with a husband who snores, a hungry cat, and an almost perfect canine––he’s an adorable little shit.
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