In the Deep: Song of the Abyss (Tower of Winds 2) by Makiia Lucier

They came in the night as she dreamt, in her berth, in a ship sailing home to del Mar. Two carracks, painted Scorpion black. No emblem flying to hint at a kingdom of origin.

"Quiet!" Gunnel ordered. She wore her sword. "Up, up, quickly, Reyna!

Sea raiders!"

To the sound of sound of soft humming, the crewmen lie still, as if somehow enchanted, while the guttural sound of a vaguely familiar language is heard, ordering the crew of pirates looting the ship. As a map maker, Reyna knows she must save the charts of trading routes, the lifeblood of the kingdom of del Mar. With them safe in a water-tight quiver, she goes overboard and swims through the monster-filled sea until she reaches an island, a land which she recognizes as Lunes, one for which she has learned the language, but still strange and seemingly undergoing a crisis, with no torches or signs of activity, but where she hopes to find a del Marian trading ship to take her home.

As the rising sun shows her a landing, she sees the dark figure of a young man slumped, as if in grief.

In Lunesian, in a voice that rolled deep and pleasant in the dark, "Between the two of us, I wonder who's had the worst night of it!"

He tells her that he is Levi, a son of the King who has just died.

Reyna vanishes into the dawn, but later, she meets up with him again. He is the second son of the king, and when Reyna's ship is towed into the harbor with its dead, the two of them find themselves assigned the task of finding his older brother and locating the mysterious raiders before they strike again.

With Reyna's navigational knowledge and Levi's knowledge of sailing ships, they sail out from Lunes into the Sea of Magdalen and through the Strait of Cain, with its maelstrom filled with drowned but undead souls, and trace their pirates to the distant land of Miramar, a secretive and xenophobic people with exquisite etiquette and with the barbaric custom of tutto mortise, burying their ruler with his chosen retainers. It is to this land that the mysterious raiders belong, inexplicitly swapping their stolen booty for shiploads of Lunesian clay. In managing to stay alive and discover the unthinkable logic behind the piracy, Reyna and Levi find themselves falling in love.

In her Song of the Abyss (Tower of Winds) (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019), author Makiia Lucier fashions an compelling fantasy romance within an extravagantly imagined world drawn from the Mediterranean society of the early Enlightenment period. Del Mar resembles Portugal in the days of Henry the Navigator, and Lunes is reminiscent of the Venice of Marco Polo, while Miramar suggest a rigid, ingrown Asian empire. Within this exotic setting, Lucier tells the intrigue-filled story of two strong-minded, star-crossed, but chaste lovers whose love and loyalty grow during their own odyssey through their world. The sequel to Lucier's Isle of Blood and Stone (Tower of Winds), this title sets the roles of the characters for the last book of the trilogy, perfect for knowledgeable young adult readers with promise for those who crave a bit of sophistication, an amalgamation of familiar cultures with fantasy, in their romance novels.

Blood of Life and Death: Bloodleaf by Crystal Smith

"Blood magic is rooted in emotion," he said. "Pain, pleasure, fear, passion--anything that heightens your emotion can be used to increase the strength of your spell. But therein also lies the trouble. It's easy to let the magic overtake you. It's like a dam on a river. If you aren't careful, you can bring the whole dam down on top of yourself."

Princess Aurelia senses that she is a witch, possessed of forbidden blood magic. But she is a royal witch in the witch-hunting kingdom of Renalt, with a power-grabbing Tribunal that would destroy her and her family if they knew of her power. Warned by the wraithlike spirit of the Harbinger, Aurelia sees that her only chance of escape will be her upcoming wedding with the prince of the kingdom of Achlev. Concealing a wedding dress made by her mother the Queen and taking her little brother Conrad, Crown Prince of Renalt, Aurelia flees her kingdom, for protection switching identities with her maid Emilie, helped by her dearest friend Kellen and an enchanted Empyrean horse, Falada.

But her wedding is to be with a reclusive and reputedly frail prince, and Aurelia finds Achlev no refuge. Its protective wall, held up by enchanted gates, has been breached by evil magic which has destroyed the spell of two of its three guardian gates. The decaying kingdom itself is roiled with hate, greed, and murderous plots, led by her betrothed's father King Domhnall, who is "managed" by the evil Toris de Lena, and in Achlev, not everyone is what they seem. But Aurelia, as Emilie, finds love and help in the person of a young man who calls himself Zan. And when Zan, protecting her, is stabbed and near death, it may be only Aurelia's blood magic that can save them all and reveal their true identities to each other.

Crystal Smith's forthcoming Bloodleaf (The Bloodleaf Trilogy) (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019) is a fantastical, frightening, gory, romantic,young adult novel filled with both appalling and lovely imagery, set in a dystopic, vaguely medieval world of two rival but interrelated kingdoms. This novel is for readers who like their images vivid and their plots convoluted, with the qualities of both A Game of Thrones and The Hunger Games, the grimmest of the Grimm Brothers tales, and the inbred internecine warfare of classic mythology. This first of a planned trilogy is not for the faint of heart or the hyper-sensitive psyche, but for young adult readers it is a rousing and romance-tinged page-turning fantasy adventure.