Bella Street Romance Goes Retro

One of the best lines of St Patrick's Day is "Kiss me, I'm Irish". There's also that whole kissing the Blarney Stone thing. Something about kissing and romance just go with March 17th like a leprechaun to gold. If you're in the mood for a little Irish romance, I want to recommend a wonderful book I stayed up reading until the wee hours of the morn (a little Irish flair there). The Spell of the Selkie isn't just a sweetly spicy romance that takes your breath away,  it will make you fall in love with Ireland itself. Honestly, the book should have a link to a travel agency in the back, because after reading it, I WANT TO GO! In this modern-day fairy tale romance, American doctor Tara Moore’s life is transformed when she travels to an enchanted Irish island and discovers she has the power to break a 200-year-old curse. At first, Tara laughs off the villagers’ speculation that she is descended from a selkie—a magical creature who is bewitching the isl...

So what does Transylvania and an Irish romance have in common? The Urban Dictionary says that an Irish Dracula is a paragon of slow execution, physically or mentally. This must be an inside joke unknowable to a Hungarian like myself, so we'll move on to the idea that Dracula was an Irishman. W as Dracula really based on an Irish legend? Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, himself was an Irishman who grew up playing in graveyards , and there's a fascinating legend that the Irish version of a vampire was more Stoker's inspiration than Vlad the Impaler: Abhartach was either a dwarf or a small, deformed man who was a tyrannical Celtic chief over his people and thought to have magical powers. The legend goes that the local people were so afraid of him that they hired a warrior to kill him. The warrior succeeded, but Abhartach rose from the grave, demanding a blood sacrifice to drink from his subjects. The warrior killed him two more times, and two more times the Celti...