This book takes longer to wind up the life-and-death tension that characterizes all three of this author's novels that have been published to date than did the previous two, though when it gets there you say to yourself, "Yeah, Keira Dominguez is back." But the breathing room Dominguez gives herself and the reader for the first 50% of the book allows for more of the traditional features of a romance novel......if by "traditional" you mean "characteristic of Essie Summers." Dominguez has mentioned in her public blogging that she loves the novels of (among others) Essie Summers, and that she studied Summers's work when she was learning her own craft. This novel adopts a technique that Summers used extensively to set her novels apart from most of her genre: Dominguez arranges for her leading lady Penny to fall in love with an entire family, not just with a hunky man, and so we see the heroine learn not just one single kind of love, but several different kinds all at once. As with almost all Summers novels, there are main characters from three different generations, all of whose hearts and affections have differently shaped keyholes, as it were, and all of whom Penny must succeed in loving in order to find her way to her happy ending. This was the primary method Summers used to widen her artistic canvas (and, for that matter, her paying audience) beyond the scope of a typical 1960's/70's Mills & Boon romance, and Dominguez achieves the same effect: the emotional range (not depth, but range) of The Sweet Rowan is rather broader than is that of her first two novels.That the novel is deliberately hat-tipping Summers, not just borrowing her technique, is suggested by the Scottish setting, by the use of just enough Scots to give us the flavor of being in Scotland without enough dialect to render half the book unreadable by Americans, by the liberal use of quoted poetry, by the fact that the child who is clearly a gifted bard is named Robbie, and of course by the fact that the main character, like half of Summers's heroines, meets her man by taking a position as governess without ever having been a governess before (and with the destiny of never being a governess again). It also seems significant to me that the main character is named Penny, given that Summers's character Penny Beechington, like Penny Thornton, made her first appearance as a minor character who existed as a more important character's younger sister, and then in a subsequent book got promoted to star status. Perhaps some of this is mere coincidence, but there are enough of these coincidences in my opinion to constitute enemy action.All of this would, I'm sure, have been appreciated by Summers; but what would have most pleased Summers -- who served as a mentor to several younger authors -- is the fact that Dominguez has LEARNED from Summers how to employ entire families to enrich her two main characters' romance, and that she uses what she has learned to great effect. I am sure that the master would approve of the student's work.In any further comments, I must restrict myself so as not to commit the sin of spoiling, and also I don't want to repeat things I have already said about Dominguez's work in reviewing Her Caprice and The Telling Touch. This poses a challenge, because I very much like a number of artistic choices Dominguez makes in this book, but can't say non-spoilingly what those choices are. Let's see...By emphasizing Penny's Englishness, and making broad Scots both unpronounceable by and incomprehensible to the main character, Dominguez gives herself a perfect excuse both to introduce ample Scots dialect to establish her atmosphere, and also to have someone consistently explaining to Penny (and thus to American readers) what it all means. Nicely played, that.Readers who have read Dominguez's earlier books are rewarded, because Dominguez not only reuses characters from her previous books, but also plays off of what her readers already know about the earlier books:(a) The main character, Penny, is the younger sister of the heroine of Her Caprice, and in Her Caprice Penny was discovered to have the same magical ability as her sister. (Not a spoiler because not in any way critical to the plot of Her Caprice, I think.) Her Caprice was about how the elder Beatrice had to figure out how to live a life enriched by, rather than constrained by, that gift, which she has been raised to consider a curse; and the natural expectation would have been that Penny would benefit from her sister's experience. Instead, The Sweet Rowan begins with Penny's fully embracing and highly valuing that gift -- and then losing it. So as we read through The Sweet Rowan watching Penny try to deal with having lost her gift, there are constant echoes of and contrasts with Her Caprice.(b) Isabelle was the villainess in The Telling Touch, where two sisters had similar gifts but used them quite differently. In that book, the issue was how Isabelle abused her power. In this book, Isabelle reappears, but now, like Penny, she has lost hers; and so Dominguez is now able to develop Isabelle's character in rather a different direction, as now the question is how she will deal with powerlessness rather than with power. Isabelle was a compelling and interesting character in The Telling Touch, and she is a compelling and interesting character again in The Sweet Rowan -- but in a new and different way. I thought the direction Dominguez took her was believable, interesting, and thoroughly serviceable to the plot, which plot, I might add, I was not able to predict in any but the most general of outlines.(c) In Her Caprice, Dominguez explores how the same gift could be both a curse and a blessing. In The Telling Touch, she explores how two different, but similarly gifted, individuals can be taken in radically different directions by their differing personalities and choices, even when they have essentially identical gifts. In The Sweet Rowan, she looks at how two different individuals who are suffering with essentially the same loss (in this case, the loss of magical ability), can deal with it in very different ways...but (and I have to tread the spoiler precipice carefully here) in this case it is not so much a difference in personality as a difference in experience. The Sweet Rowan is, if I may put it this way, a very Scottish book, and one way in which it is Scottish is that it implicitly makes a helluva case for Calvinism. (Of course I have no idea whether that was intentional.)In other words, Dominguez has (at least for her first three novels) chosen the genre of Magical Regency Thriller Romance. But in all three of the novels she has published to date, while she fulfills the requirements of her genre and delivers on Oscar Wilde's definition of fiction, her characters and plots are informed with a deep understanding of human nature and the dilemmas we find ourselves in, so that there is more to the novels than just the romance and the suspense. To my mind Dominguez is consistently transcending her genre.If you simply happen to find the genre itself incompatible with your own tastes, then there is no harm, no foul, no hard feelings on either side; de gustibus and all that. Otherwise, I recommend A Sweet Rowan unreservedly, and merely suggest that your experience of A Sweet Rowan will be enhanced if you have read Her Caprice and The Telling Touch first.P.S. If you aren't familiar with Oscar Wilde's definition of fiction, it is found in The Importance of Being Ernest:MISS PRISM.Do not speak slightingly of the three-volume novel, Cecily. I wrote one myself in earlier days.CECILY.Did you really, Miss Prism? How wonderfully clever you are! I hope it did not end happily? I don’t like novels that end happily. They depress me so much.MISS PRISM.The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.