Will I ever tire of fairy-tale retellings? NOPE. I most certainly will not. The Lady in the Coppergate Tower is sweet, dazzling and fun from start to finish.


Hazel Hughes has spent her life believing she is a Medium—someone who can talk to ghosts. But as of yet, that skill has remained frustratingly elusive. She is also suffering from a reoccurring childhood dream of someone who looks almost exactly like Hazel, but this dream version of herself is slowly going mad.

Sam MacInnes is a talented surgeon who runs in the highest social circles thanks to his family’s position and history. When Sam hires Hazel to assist him with his medical practice, he is immediately drawn to her intelligence, wit, and beauty.

Their potential relationship is derailed one evening when a mysterious count arrives in London and reveals to Hazel the truth about her past: she was abducted at birth and her twin sister has fallen dangerously ill.

Hazel agrees to travel to Romania with Count Petrescu in order to save her sister, and Sam insists on accompanying her. The count has secrets, though, and the journey grows more sinister with every mile that draws Hazel closer to her homeland. Even as her feelings for Sam become deeper and more complicated, she fears she might not survive the quest to save her sister with her heart intact, not to mention her life. She must learn to draw on gifts she doesn’t know she has if they are going to ever return home again.

Hazel and Sam must fight their way past dark magic, clockwork beasts, and their own insecurities as they try to reach her sister in the impenetrable Coppergate Tower before time runs out.



Retellings can always be a bit of a mixed bag. Especially retellings that bend genres. I think that my personal favourites, when it comes to re imaginings, are the ones that full on embrace new tropes or genre types. Which is why The Lady in the Coppergate Tower was so intriguing to me--described as part dystopian, part Steampunk--from the start. This proper romance felt like the right fit, due to its uniqueness.

The good news is, it definitely lived up to my expectations of it. The Lady in the Coppergate Tower is lush and unlike any of the retellings I've read in 2019 thus far. Deeply imaginative, high paced and utterly captivating, I was unable to put this book down. Nancy Campbell Allen pens a classic romance that will surely leave its audience on the edge of their seat and with a lasting fondness.

Mixed with a mesmerizing amount of worldbuilding, mythology and familiar steampunk elements, The Lady in the Coppergate Tower is a dazzling and romantic romp of its own caliber. Pages into it, readers will be able to visualize everything in Nancy Campbell Allen's vivid prose. This novel is certainly for the romantic at heart.

If you love love, if you love fantasy, if you love fairy-tales, The Lady in the Coppergate Tower will be engrossing as can be for you. Although there were some things in it that I wasn't keen on (nothing worth noting in the review, because my feelings towards it are positive) during the novel, it proved to be entertaining and I genuinely had a good time reading it.  

Up until The Lady in the Coppergate Tower, I'd not familiarized myself with the series it originates from. It can be, after-all, read as a standalone. Although now, I certainly have it on my TBR and will gladly be picking up more novels by the author in the future.