Title: The Lawyer and the Leprechaun 

Author: Tara Maya

Quote: "Normally, her snakes rested in their alternate form, tiny braids."

Eleni, the lawyer in this "romantasy," is a Gorgon. 

It is often overlooked--though not by Robert Graves--that several people and places in Greek mythology were not Greek. The peerless beauty of Cassiopeia and Andromeda was clearly identified as Ethiopian. Some writers wanted Perseus to be Greek, but others said he was called that because he was Persian. And the Gorgons may well have been African; their snaky hair might originally have been small braids or cornrows. Their gaze "turned men to stone." The Greek writers seem to have taken this phrase literally but most of them did not take it as implying that the Gorgons were ugly. On the contrary. They were enchanting. 

Eleni is enchanting, though we're told on page one that she's blind. Her magical power developed early; she turned an innocent person to stone and, before the legal system for "arcane" people could sentence her to lose her eyes, she blinded herself. She sees through the eyes of her snakes, which see heat patterns more clearly than shapes or colors as we know colors.

Tara Maya put a lot of thought into building the fictive world for this series. If you're up for a fantasy in which you'll see everything in terms of heat patterns, you'll enjoy The Lawyer and the Leprechaun and you'll probably want all the other books set in the same world.

Anyway: One day Eleni wakes up and finds herself magically shackled to Owen, the leprechaun, who isn't really Irish but affects an exaggerated Irish accent and is guilty of all sorts of petty magical crimes. The two naturally have never been friends, but in order to break their shackles they have to work together, and become friends. They will share a long fantasy adventure with a kind of internal logic and no connection to the real world at all. By the end they're in love. 

If you enjoy that sort of story, run don't walk, and get the whole series.