I have always loved a fairy story. From the Flower Fairies I played with in my childhood, to the Bat Boys that occupy my middle age novels, something about the otherness of the fairy world has long lingered in my imagination. A parallel world, with similarities but so many differences. A shared world with a shared history. The ways in which the fairy stories of the past interact with the modern tales we tell ourselves. There is nothing like a good fairy story.
My favorite kind of fairy story focuses on a world such as ours but in which the fairies of our imagination are real. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke has had a tight hold on me since it was released in 2004, and more recently the delightful world of fairy academia of Emily Wilde has had me even more transfixed. I was therefore overjoyed to read the preview of The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door by H. G. Parry, and upon finishing the book, I can only hope for more!
The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door joins our world with the land of the Fae in a shocking and explosive way, on the battlefields of World War One. On the fields of battle our heroine’s brother is one of hundreds struck by a fairy curse, but one of few to survive. Clover Hill has led a quiet and impoverished life in the North of England, until War pulls apart the world in which she lives. When her brother returns one night in the arms of a strange savior, he carries with him the hurts of war and the curse of a fairy. That night her world is shattered in ways that even the war had not managed, as she learns of the other world living alongside ours. A world of magic, and fairies, and ancient families that straddle the border between the two. Her journey begins that day as her life’s mission becomes finding a cure for her brother, as the curse claims more of him each year.
Clover wins a scholarship to Camford, the magical university born out of long forgotten magical departments from Oxford and Cambridge Universities.
I knew I needed to be here. This place, at least, the war had never touched. It had been battered by so many centuries of magic and scholarship, and it had weathered all those centuries unchanged. From here I could fix everything.
She is a commoner with no connections, no magical blood, but more talent and drive than everyone else put together. A friendless undergrad she catches the eye of the dazzling Alden Lennox-Fontaine and along with his friends Hero and Eddie she finds that the doors that were previously closed to her in both her lives are now wide open.
Clover has discovered this magical world just as it is seemingly changing forever. Fairy was once open, but is now closed. The doors that would let magical families interact with Fairy were sealed after the explosion of magic that resulted in mass casualties. The magical families have united and closed all the faerie doors, locking them at key points in Berlin, Paris, and London, and leaving them with the magic of this world and no more.
The heart of this world however, is riddled with secrets and lies. magical politicians are still first and foremost politicians. As Clover and her friends pursue their own hidden paths, they discover far more about the secrets and each other than they can handle.
The story is told in several parts and spans over a decade, from Clover’s first introduction to magic, to her time at university, to the later careers and paths of Clover and her friends. Each part is engaging and enticing, drawing you in to each part of this world. While set in an English university this is not the magic of Hogwarts, this is wilder, grittier, more entwined with the dirt and bones of our world.
Once, unexpectedly, a thread of ivy snaked out and snatched at my arm. I flinched back. Eddie at once spoke a spell I didn’t know, and the plant withdrew… “There’s a tone – a timbre of magic – that plants can hear. I’ve spent a lot of time finding it, that’s all. It’s not usually so dramatic. Usually I just get the vegetables to grow better.
The four characters that the novel focuses on, Clover, Alden, Hero, and Eddie, are all shockingly different from each other, and it makes for some wonderful dialogue and scenes between them. They each have their comfortable spots, and each is drawn to the others for different reasons. Eddie’s relationship to all three is especially fascinating to me, and I both mourn for him and love how his life has turned out post university.
Clover’s homelife is reflected upon throughout the book, and its poverty but loving setting is placed in sharp contrast with Alden’s decadent upbringing. Of particular interest to me, is that her home is set in Pendle, a rather green and spooky part of Lancashire that I visited several times as a child. Tales of witchcraft and fairy are all over that area of the country, and it was a nice inclusion to have part of the novel set there.
The book is a love song to the worlds of discovery and imagination, set in that peculiar time in English history between the wars, where everything and nothing seemed possible, and everyone was scarred by the past, and unknowing of what lay ahead.
New discoveries in magic are made all the time. The best way is only the best until someone finds something better.
Oh, and if you feel like encountering a sentient library, this is the book for you!
H.G. Parry lives Wellington, New Zealand, surrounded by books and Rabbits. Her Rabbits are called Mr. Norrell and Thistledown and now I want to pet them even more. Her short stories have appeared in Intergalactic Medicine Show, Daily Science Fiction, and small press anthologies. Her debut novel was The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep. GeekMom received an ARC of this book for review purposes.
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