Jude Deveraux helped popularize time travel romances in the 1970s and 1980s, so she’s a natural to jump into the Romantasy field with her new duology, Blue Swan. I did expect some old skool tomfoolery in Order of Swans and got it; unfortunately, along with that old-school crazysauce, I also got that hoary old chestnut of the era: the too stupid to live heroine.

Twenty-six year old Kaley Arens is a folklorist on the cusp of getting a doctorate.Unfortunately, her advisor rejects her thesis, leaving her feeling frustrated and upset. Kaley has been struggling with leaving the homeschooling world and the intensely insular family life she grew up in. College life has not suited her either. Visiting Jobi, a friend of the family who is somewhere in his fifties (so he says), she finds herself excitedly agreeing to go to Jobi’s home island of Bellis for a vacation. It takes her awhile to realize that Bellis isn’t an island on Earth – it’s a whole other planet. Everyone around her recognizes her uniqueness and the high level of her power, though she remains clueless. Slowly, Kaley begins to realize that on Bellis, fairy tales and reality merge and collide – she has the ability to affect how they change with her actions. Thus, she is called upon to help rescue the kingdom’s missing prince.

Kaley teams up with the grumpy Tanek of the titular Order of Swans and Tanek’s very tall bodyguard, Sojee. Will Kaley figure out her powers, acclimate to this world – and deal with her burgeoning attraction to Tanek?

Stories like Order of the Swans rise and fall on the backs of their central heroines, and unfortunately for Deveraux, Kaley is not strong enough to hold up a whole book series. For someone about to get her phD, Kaley is the most irritatingly incurious person I’ve seen in fiction in many a moon. Dragged feet-first through the plot by people smarter than her, she is simply Born Special and thus destined to save the universe, even though she’s flotsam on the top of the plot’s waves. By the end of the book she comes into her own – a little – but it’s not enough.

Her incipient romance with Tanek feels less driven by their oil and water chemistry than by the quasi-alpha/beta/omega dynamics. If you tell a girl you will literally die if you lose her because swans mate for life and she’s not sure she wants to go through with it because she might miss earth, well, that’s not a good sign. Especially not in a romance.

What does work is the worldbuilding, which is interesting and fresh. It’s not enough but it does keep Order of the Swans humming along. Hopefully the second book will make Kaley more interesting. If you like romantasy, you could try this but I might wait and see if book two improves Kaley before plunging in.