The Ice Swan is a slow-burn and rather tender romance about two people building a relationship after their worlds have crumbled around them. It is set in the Russian emigré community in Paris during the final months of the Great War, and then in rural Scotland in the War’s aftermath, and it manages to be both angsty and gentle. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Princess Svetlana Dalsky fled the Bolshevik uprising in Russia with her mother and younger sister, and is now living among dozens of other refugees in the basement of a Russian Orthodox Church in Paris. Her father, brother and betrothed remained in Russia to fight, and her mother is both too conscious of her own status as a princess and too emotionally overwhelmed by the situation to be of much help. And so Svetlana has become the one responsible for keeping all of them safe.

When she is injured while seeking an apartment to rent, Svetlana crosses the path of Wynn, a Scottish surgeon who is working in a military hospital. Wynn is the sort of person who never met an injury he didn’t want to heal or a stray he didn’t want to adopt. And when said stray is a stunningly beautiful young woman, well, the urge to help (and maybe flirt a bit) is irresistible. Svetlana is initially resistant to both his charm and his offers of assistance, but when she finds herself trapped in an impossible situation, a marriage of convenience seems like the only solution.

I found this story both fascinating and compelling. I was drawn in first by the setting. I’ve read a few stories set during the Great War, but the Russian émigré community is not something I’ve seen depicted in a novel, and of course there must have been huge numbers of wealthy Russians who had to flee the revolution. It felt very well-researched and very vivid, particularly the ways the various social stratas tried to recreate themselves, even in exile. The combination of fear and poverty on the one hand, with flamboyance and over-consumption on the other felt like a very convincing communal response to trauma.

(Also, because I am Catherine, I am contractually obliged to tell you that there was some seriously good Russian food porn in this book. Just in case you were wondering. I now have a craving for cherry vareniki. Have I ever eaten vareniki? I have not. Do I still crave them? Absolutely.)

I liked Svetlana very much. She has been raised to be a perfect ice princess, with beautiful manners but few practical skills. She has also been discouraged from expressing emotion, mostly because her mother seems to feel that the emotions Svetlana has are all wrong. While it was Svetlana’s ability to remain detached and pragmatic that got her family out of St Petersburg, one gets the sense that her mother thinks the less of her for it because a true princess would be unable to bear the indignity of it all.

Svetlana’s only emotional outlet is dance, and this becomes a metaphor for her emotional journey. At first, dancing is impossible – there is hardly room for such things under a church, and in any case, she and her family are barely surviving. Later, as they become embroiled in the Russian underworld, which provides material comfort but at a high personal cost, her dancing becomes part of the trap that they are caught in. It is only once she is in Scotland and safe that Svetlana can truly dance again.

Svetlana stretched her arms out to greet the chilled air in a dancer’s embrace as her feet slid to fifth position with opposite toe to opposite heel. A tremble ran up her legs, swirled around her stomach. Lengthening along her spine until her scalp tingled with anticipation. Weighted burdens fell away as she came into herself. Her slippers glided effortlessly across the floor, the velvet fold of her robe rippling around her like water rings on a pond’s surface as the music’s rhythm flooded her soul.

Wynn is a perfect foil for Svetlana, because he shares her pragmatism, but has a sense of certainty in himself that Svetlana lacks. This certainty gives him the confidence to be far more emotionally open than Svetlana dares to be. One thing I really liked about him is the way he put his cards on the table and then left Svetlana the choice of picking them up. He makes it clear early on that he wants to help, and that he is attracted to her, but when she tells him to back off, he does. And when he offers marriage, he makes it clear that it can be a marriage in name only, but that his door will always be unlocked, should she wish to make more of it. He recognises that Svetlana cannot trust easily, and he doesn’t demand trust of her. Instead, he offers a friendship that is remarkably unconditional.

“You’ll never intrude, Svetlana. Not at my door. It is always open for you. All you have to do is step through.”

The structure of this story divides very neatly into two halves, which I found unusual and rather lovely. The first half of the book contains the vast majority of the physical peril and adventure. Svetlana and her family are threatened from many sides – by the Bolsheviks, by members of the Russian emigré underworld, and by the more impersonal forces of disease and poverty. And in the background there is the War, of course, with the peril that this implies. Everything feels very high stakes. During this part of the story, Wynn, while certainly under great pressure from his job, is a secure, stable centre, and once Svetlana comes to trust him, he is able to rescue her.

But in the second half of the story, both the tone of the narrative and the dynamic between Wynn and Svetlana change. The War ends, and the marriage begins. Svetlana and her family are safe, and with everyone out of immediate danger, the story goes from being about survival to the quieter questions of how to build a relationship and a life in the post-war world. And while Svetlana is growing into herself, it is Wynn whose world is falling apart and Wynn who needs rescuing.

Wynn really is a fantastic romance hero – I loved his passion for surgery, his deep curiosity and fascination with the human body, and his equally deep compassion and care for his patients. His weakness and his strength come from the same source: that bone-deep confidence in who he is and what he can do, which comes from knowing his place in the world. And when his world abruptly changes, andhe now has to play a very different role, he doesn’t really have the tools to shift direction. Svetlana does.

I also loved the way both Wynn and Svetlana assume the best of each other. There were so many times when I tensed in anticipation of a Big Misunderstanding, and then Wynn or Svetlana would think about what they had seen, think about what they knew about each other, and decide to believe each other. While they were not entirely immune from stupid decisions, these were very few and far between and made sense for their characters. By and large, this was a relationship between two very sensible people who were pleasingly disinclined to create problems where none existed. As a reader, I appreciated their mutual presumption of good faith, because there was a lot of Peril and Angst in this book that was external to the relationship. I did not need the relationship to be an Angst-fest too

I’ve been reviewing a lot of comfort reads recently, and The Ice Swan certainly isn’t that. There is a lot of angst and a lot of tension in the story, and both Wynn and Svetlana encounter a lot of grief and pain during the course of the narrative. I found myself reading faster and faster and indeed renewing my membership of the Bad Decisions Book Club, because I needed to know that everyone was OK.

But despite my current gravitation towards low-angst, cosy romances, I loved this book. I loved the unique setting and the interesting story structure, but most of all, I loved Wynn and Svetlana. I loved them as individuals, and I loved them as a couple. They are both people of great integrity and strength, with an innate desire to help and serve the people around them. I loved the way each of them went through a trial by fire during the course of this story, and emerged stronger and more compassionate as a result. And I loved the way they saved each other, and made each other whole.

(OK, I do have one quibble. Wynn was seriously hot and it was a closed door romance. Would one sex scene have been too much to ask?)