The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door by H.G. Parry

Olivia reviews The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door, a standalone historical fantasy novel by H.G. Parry.

From the author of The Magician’s Daughter comes The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door, a mythic, magical tale full of secret scholarship, faerie curses, and the deadliest spells of all—the ones that friends cast on each other.

All they needed to break the world was a door, and someone to open it.

Camford, 1920. Gilded and glittering, England’s secret magical academy is no place for Clover, a commoner with neither connections nor magical blood. She tells herself she has fought her way there only to find a cure for her brother Matthew, one of the few survivors of a faerie attack on the battlefields of WWI which left the doors to faerie country sealed, the study of its magic banned, and its victims cursed.

But when Clover catches the eye of golden boy Alden Lennox-Fontaine and his friends, doors that were previously closed to her are flung wide open, and she soon finds herself enmeshed in the seductive world of the country’s magical aristocrats. The summer she spends in Alden’s orbit leaves a fateful mark: months of joyous friendship and mutual study come crashing down when experiments go awry, and old secrets are unearthed.

Years later, when the faerie seals break, Clover knows it’s because of what they did. And she knows that she must seek the help of people she once called friends—and now doesn’t quite know what to call—if there’s any hope of saving the world as they know it.

“But the world had never been safe, not for everybody. It had been broken for a very long time, and the war had only shown those cracks for what they were.”

 Daffodil, by Florence + The Machine

Honestly, this dark academia fantasy had me at “scary faeries”, and it only got better from there. By turns wondrous, haunting, and mysterious, The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door asks big questions and delivers all the right answers. This book is historical fantasy at its finest.

The novel’s protagonist, Clover, finds herself dragged into the secret magical side of 1920s England when her brother returns home from the Great War under a terrible faerie curse. As Clover tries to pursue a cure for him, she secures a place for herself at Camford, a magical school mostly populated by the scions of elite, wealthy families. Clover’s research into faerie magic is forbidden, however, and the friendships that she makes with her privileged peers soon lull her into a false sense of security that will eventually be shattered.

As the book goes on, H.G. Parry proves that she’s an author after my own heart with magical metaphors that act as pointed critiques on wealth, privilege, and academic structures. Parry’s language is also lush, eerie, and beautiful in a way that’s simply enjoyable to read; everything to do with faeries is dark and just the right amount of uncomfortable, and the magic in the setting has a perfect touch of mystery. As such, I devoured this book in a single sitting—and I suspect that most other readers will, too.