This author clearly knows her setting

[conuly]

It's obviously Appalachia, and judging from her bio I'm guessing it's specifically the Great Smoky Mountains. A post-Columbian exchange Appalachia, with domestic Eurasian livestock and introduced, naturalized Eurasian flora such as dandelions, mullein, and rosemary. (And it looks like no American Chestnuts, but maybe they just haven't bumped into any.)

Which would be fine, except it's pretty jarring when the described society is a pre-gunpowder Standard European Fantasyland where everybody mostly lives in the same places that they've lived in for the past thousand or more generations, universally ruled over by hereditary monarchs. There don't appear to be displaced Native Americans, but then, there also don't appear to be Roma or Jews.

Setting: 5 stars, feels like you're there
General worldbuilding: it wouldn't clash so badly if the setting wasn't so great

Comments

[nodrog]

Maybe there's a land bridge to Europe…?

Or a LOT of Bronze-Age trans-Atlantic commerce, back when the Mexicans were encountering the “bearded white men from beyond the ocean horizon” they still remembered when the Spaniards showed up.

(Grr…  Y’ know, one bead of Egyptian faience found in a British passage grave proved commerce to exist across that vast distance.  All we would need is to find one (1) bronze artifact, anything, in a Toltec or Olmec tomb.  Please.)

[conuly]

Sometime lack of proof really is proof of lack. Lots of people have stories about big worldwide floods, but that doesn't mean there was ever one.

[nodrog]

But where there’s smoke there’s fire, and as we dig farther into it the past constantly gets bigger and busier.  We may not yet have hard artifact evidence, but the smoke in this case is hard to ignore:  The bearded white men had returned as they’d said they would.  Oops…  Plus the presence of cotton in both Old and New Worlds is hard to otherwise explain.

As for floods, define “world.”  You better believe Mesopotamia flooded - it’s all mud flats, not a stone to be found, a land created by flooding.  If “world” means “as far as the eye can see, to the uttermost horizon,” one hard winter rain could spread mud-brick-obliterating silt-brown water across the entire world by definition.