Ciara Smyth Books

Ciara Smyth is a Belfast-based author who studied drama, then teaching, then social work, which is a career path that shows up in her fiction as a fairly unsentimental understanding of how young people actually behave. Her debut, The Falling in Love Montage, was published in 2020 and won the Children's Books Ireland Junior Juries' Award and was shortlisted for the An Post Irish Book Awards YA Book of the Year. Her second novel, Not My Problem, won the Waterstones Children's Book Prize in the Older Readers category. Two books, a shelf of awards, and no discernible interest in writing anything with a dragon in it.

What defines her writing is the joke-to-grief ratio. Her narrators are funny in a specific, recognisable way: they deflect. The comedy is not decoration, it is characterisation, and the books work because the reader can see what the narrator is talking around long before the narrator can. The dialogue is genuinely good, which is rare in the category, and the Irish setting is specific rather than generic. Nobody is quaint. People have jobs and buses and mothers who are difficult for boring, real reasons.

The Falling in Love Montage gives you Saoirse in the summer after school finishes, agreeing to a deliberately temporary romance built entirely out of rom-com set pieces, on the explicit condition that it ends when summer does. The structure is the point: she is trying to have feelings inside a container she controls, and it does not work, because it never does. Family pressure she is refusing to look at sits underneath the whole thing. Not My Problem follows Aideen, who starts fixing other students' problems as an increasingly elaborate way of avoiding her own, and it is the funnier of the two while also being the sadder one.

On heat, this is a flat 0 on the spice scale we use. These are young adult contemporary novels. There is kissing, there is longing, there is nothing else on the page, and that is entirely appropriate to what they are. Do not come to them for anything else.

The honest framing on why she appears in a romantasy database: she does not write romantasy, has never written romantasy, and probably has no plans to. She is here because this genre burns readers out. Somewhere around the fourth consecutive book about a girl who is secretly the heir to a magical kingdom, a lot of people need something short, contemporary and funny to reset with, and sapphic Irish rom-coms with real jokes do that job better than almost anything else. If you like the grumpy and sunshine dynamic in your fantasy reads, you will find a more grounded version of the same energy here, without the war plot bolted on.

One note on this site specifically: we previously had These Hollow Vows listed under her name. That book is by Lexi Ryan, not Ciara Smyth, and the attribution has been flagged for correction. We would rather admit that than quietly fix it, because the point of this database is that you can trust what is on it.

Where to start: The Falling in Love Montage first, because it is the lighter of the two and it will tell you within thirty pages whether her voice is for you. Then Not My Problem, which is better but hits harder. Both are short, both are standalone, and neither will take you more than an afternoon. If you are working out what you actually want from your next read after a heavy fantasy run, our reading quiz is a reasonable place to start, and it will happily send you somewhere with a lower page count than usual.