All About Romance mostly receives review copies of romance novels, but publishers occasionally send other types of fiction if they have a strong romantic component. This, no doubt, is why they sent Jane Routley’s Aramaya. And, though she has attempted to place personal relationships at the forefront of the book, they are the story’s most unsuccessful elements.

Aramaya follows the adventures of Dion Holyhands, a woman blessed with great magical gifts. Dion built a reputation for herself as a powerful mage and demonslayer in Routley’s Fire Angels and many pages are devoted to this reputation as nobles and mages pay homage to the Demonslayer of Gallia. But while Dion’s past great deeds may warrant this kind of attention, her character certainly did not.

On the surface, Aramaya tells the story of Dion’s quest to locate her estranged niece, another mage who may have fallen in with a dangerous crowd. But the book is really about Dion’s attempts to come to terms with a miscarriage she suffered two years ago, and to reconcile herself to the fact that she may be barren. These are emotional hurdles that deserve to be explored. However, Routley has chosen to use first person narration, and Dion’s perspective quickly becomes wearying. Despite her legendary accomplishments, Dion cannot see beyond her inability to have children. At times, her relentless self-pity borders on the offensive: “I was such a hopeless nothing of a woman, such a failure, such a waste of flesh and blood.”

Maybe Dion was a more intriguing character in the earlier stories of this series, but in Aramaya, we never get a real sense of her. By book’s end, the reader has only the very vaguest idea of Dion’s age, appearance, and childhood. It’s hard to like her when all you have to work with is the unrelenting gloom of her recent emotional history. Dion’s deficiencies as a heroine are perhaps best highlighted by her traveling companion – Kitten (whose story is featured in Mage Heart). Aside from the goofy nickname, in Kitten, Routley has created a character with the makings of a true heroine. When Kitten suffered a miscarriage, she was divorced by her husband, disowned by her family, and exiled from her home country. But instead of whining about it for 200 pages, Kitten went on to become a legendary courtesan and then a famous actress. She’s been captured by demons, tortured, and disgraced, but she’s survived it all with her sense of adventure and her love of life intact. Now, that’s a heroine.

Routley also gets into trouble with the book’s pacing. She gets off to a good start as Dion uses magic to bring her ship safely through a storm and various battles with mages and necromancers ensue. Dion and Kitten set off for Aramaya with the demon hunter, Prince Nikoli Terzu. But then, for many, many chapters, everyone drinks tea. And that’s all they do. There’s plenty of talk about political intrigue, but none of it is very engaging or seems to go anywhere. Similarly, while the tension between Dion’s and Nikoli’s value systems is interesting, we know so little about the hero’s emotional life that their developing romance seems forced. And their extremely abbreviated love scenes left me cold.

The real shame is that once the party heads to Marzorna, Routley seems to transform herself as an author. Unlike Aramaya, Marzorna is not only fully imagined, but skillfully drawn. Routley’s Marzornan marshes are both sinister and beautiful, and rich with color and history. The climactic battle scene is equally remarkable and suggests that Routley has the potential to become a powerful imaginative force.

With her constant emphasis on fertility, Routley seems to be reaching for some kind of social statement. With the love triangle that dominates the novel’s second half, she seems to be reaching for romance. In both cases, she misses. Hopefully, in the future, Routley will give more attention to what is clearly within her grasp: a great gift for envisioning the fantastic.