How entertaining is “City of Iron and Ivy”? I didn’t particularly respond to a key element of the book but I loved it, anyway.

St. Paul writer Thomas Kent West’s debut is set in the latter half of the 19th century, mostly in an alternative version of London (the queen is Viscaria, not Victoria). Elswyth Elderwood is determined to find out what happened to her sister Persephone, who seems to have been a victim of a Jack the Ripper-like killer known as the Reaper. Because her family has fallen on hard times, Elswyth also needs to find a husband to prop up their estate, which she does with the help of her uncle Percival, his assistant Kehinde and a matchmaker named Mrs. Rose.

All of this has a deliciously gothic, “Jane Eyre”-like feel. West is great at immersing us in the atmosphere and mores of the 1800s, in which Elswyth can’t find the time to use her skills in botany (she’s been accepted at Oxford) because her real job is finding someone to support her and her family. But it’s when she’s helping an unorthodox botanist, Dr. Gall, that she meets rough-hewn hunk of burning love Silas Blackthorn, with whom she embarks on a will-they-or-won’t-they flirtation.

All of that is great fun, and fans of the romance subgenre of romantasy will probably also go for the twist in “City of Iron and Ivy,” which is that several of the characters practice “floromancy,” a kind of magic that involves flowers and plants. Kehinde, for instance, can turn his flesh into a kind of hardwood armor. Elswyth can shoot ivy vines from her hands, wrapping the vines around miscreants to incapacitate them. Plants can also be used for other mysterious purposes, as when Elswyth finds a dried-up bouquet that was sent to her sister, in which the specific kinds of flowers provide clues to what happened to her.

I’m not a magic fan, so I was resistant to that stuff and sometimes confused about the rules of floromancy. It wasn’t a deal-breaker, though, because West’s descriptions of the flower magic are so vivid and because “City of Iron and Ivy” is solidly based in emotions that feel real.

Largely, it’s driven by Elswyth’s grief, both for her missing sister and for her own prospects. Here’s Elswyth, for instance, talking about how the colors and scent of wisteria will always remind her of Persephone: “Everything I see, everything I touch, everything I hear has threads that lead back to her. And so I cannot exist in the world without her.”

Elswyth is our guide into this world, and she’s easy to relate to because her feelings about her family and her future are complicated by the restrictive times in which she lives. West has created a cast of memorable characters, some of whom I suspect we’ll be seeing in future volumes: Percival is both loving and guarded, for reasons that eventually become clear. And Mrs. Rose, who seems like a dictatorial pill in her early appearances, turns out to be a gem of a comic character and something of a motivational speaker.

“There are people who will hate you regardless of what you do,” she tells Elswyth. “Do not do their work for them by hating yourself. Perhaps you cannot be the most beautiful, or the kindest, or the most graceful. Perhaps you are even cruel and strange and a monster besides. But you are your own. Remember that.”

That’s great advice, whatever the century. And it’s in those echoes of real-life humanity that this debut novel really blooms.

____

City of Iron and Ivy

By: Thomas Kent West.

Publisher: Forever, 566 pages.

©2026 The Minnesota Star Tribune. Visit at startribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.