Review: Unseen by Christy Healy

As someone who reads a lot of standalone fantasy books, I end up reading a lot of retellings. Unseen stood out to me because it’s a retelling of an Irish fairytale I’m unfamiliar with: The Snow, the Crow, and the Blood. I liked getting to read a retelling of a new-to-me fairytale, because the story felt completely fresh. I’ll have to keep an eye out for more fairytales to read for the first time!

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Title: Unseen
Author: Christy Healy
Series: Queens of Éire #2
Genre: fantasy, mythology
Publisher: Pen & Paper, LLC
Pages: 568
Audiobook length: N/A
ISBN: 9798992869811
Content warnings: violence, death, self harm/cutting, terminal illness in child, death of parent

Blurb

Fans of For the Throne and Vespertine will love this dark fairy-tale retelling of the Irish fable of ‘The Snow, The Crow, and the Blood,’ about a desperate young queen who makes a dangerous alliance with the lord of death in order to protect the one she loves, even if it means damning herself.

Riona Ó Conchúir has known death her whole life. The mysterious lord of death has tormented her for years, stealing away the souls of all those she has loved since childhood, demanding that she come and serve him in his shadowy realm, but she has always resisted – until now.

When her daughter falls ill with an incurable disease, Riona at last answers the lord of death’s call and ventures into the hidden realm of the sídhe to offer herself as a servant to him in exchange for her daughter’s life. But when he demands that she use the divine magic of her blood to find three legendary objects of power that were once wielded by the gone gods themselves, Riona soon realizes that she will be forced to make an impossible choice:

Her daughter’s life, or the realm of Éire itself.

Review of Unseen

• Format: ebook
• Pacing: slow
• Plot or character-driven: character
• POVs: dual third person POV mainly focused on one character
• Representation: N/A

Thank you to Netgalley and the author, Christy Healy, for providing me a free copy of this book in exchange for review. My opinions are my own.

Unseen is a beautiful and tragic fantasy story about the lengths parents will go to protect their children.

Unseen felt more polished than Unbound, although both stories were good. I just felt like Christy Healy grew a lot as an author between her two books. While Unbound toed the line of romance and tragedy on the romance side of the border, I would never mistake Unseen for romance. Unseen has a very tragic feel overall.

I could tell that Healy used Unseen to process her own trauma of having one of her kids go through a major health scare from type 1 diabetes. It was easy to recognize its description even in fantasy terms, and she writes about it in her author’s note. What this means for the story is that it is very heavy, with the main character having to sacrifice everything to save her daughter.

Although Unseen isn’t romance, it does contain a love story. I LOVE that we got a true cinnamon roll love interest! Conor was the sweetest. He was definitely the most easy character to like. Riona was more selfish and impulsive, and I found myself wanting to yell at her a lot during the first quarter of the book! She was such a mean kid! I actually love how well the author understood how mean children can be, even if they have good hearts overall.

Keeping in theme with the first book, Unseen is told across multiple timelines. I felt like multiple timelines wasn’t as fitting for this story as with the last book, but it was still well done and I like that it keeps the series cohesive.

I don’t think I was the right audience for Unseen. I read for escapism, so this story just made me very sad. I think there are readers who may find Unseen cathartic, or they may appreciate the tragedy of it. Christy Healy writes very vivid, emotional stories, which I can appreciate. She is definitely an author I am going to look out for in the future, but I may have to check to make sure the story isn’t going to be too heartbreaking for me!

You’ll like this book if you enjoy…

• Books that make you cry
• Dark fairytale retellings

Unseen by Christy Healy will be available on August 26th, 2025! Find out more:

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Have you read Unseen? Let’s chat in the comments!