The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door

• Author: H.G. Parry
• Genre: Fantasy
• Publication Date: October 22, 2024
• Publisher: Redhook

Thank you to Orbit, Redhook, and Oliver Wehner for sending me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

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.

H.G. Parry came onto my radar with The Magician’s Daughter, and this book far surpassed the high standards I was hoping for from it. The summary sounded fascinating, and Parry’s skill at whimsical historical fantasy would ensure that this was a good read. I had no idea how great it would be.

Urban fantasy in Parry’s talented hands is a delight. Beneath the veneer of 1920s England is a secret and hidden magical academy. Magical blood and family connections are the standard, yet Clover gets into the school with neither due to sheer force of will. Behind that iron determination is her motivation: rescuing her brother from a fatal faerie curse that killed nearly everyone on the battlefield. The world-building is detailed and understandable, and I enjoyed learning about how this whole other world worked.

The school itself isn’t discussed as much as the relationships that Clover falls into while attending the school, and what they get up to. I wasn’t quite expecting golden boy Alden to treat Clover nicely—usually that kind of character winds up being a bully, so it was even more intriguing to see their relationship develop, as well as her relationships with his other friends, Hero and Eddie, as she’s sort of absorbed into the friend group. It was fascinating to see how those relationships changed over the years, as well.

Parry’s writing is more of a slow-paced amble rather than a mad dash to the finish—allowing readers to absorb the complexity of the world she created and get to know the characters to the point where it felt like I was right there in the friend group, just a silent partner. The historical aspects pertaining to the 1920s are present, with the most obvious example being the presence of women being allowed at higher education, although it is limited to just two women, both in the same friend group.

Clover is such a wonderfully complex character, marked by her tendency to live in the liminal space between two opposites. She lives in a time when women were expected to want to raise children and be a housewife, but is willing to throw this societal expectation out the window; she’s fiercely devoted to her family but also feels a sense of independence being away from them; despite the school’s bias towards only admitting students from magical families or those with magical blood, she’s able to attend the school and do well; and attending a magical school populated by elites, and her status as a ‘scholarship witch.’

Faeries are not the fun, Tinkerbell Disney version we’re used to in this book, they’re dangerous and brutal, as we see from the outcome of a WWI battle that Clover’s brother, Matthew was in, and was one of the very few people who get out alive. But his window to live is getting shorter as the curse worsens, so Clover takes on the task of finding a cure. What she discovers is a long, meandering journey, but it’s so worth the wait when you get to the end. It’s a study in dark academia, portals to the land of Faerie, and long-held secrets held at the center of their world.

While this is very much a character driven fantasy, the ending of the ride made me realize that it was also a plot-driven to some extent. Seeing the difference between the way that Clover moves through the world and how Alden and his friends do highlighted the class bias of the time, and to be honest, it hasn’t changed a lot since then. Rich elites can get away with a lot of things that us regular, working-class folk can’t, and Clover sees this on full display over the course of the novel, which is told entirely through her perspective.

Overall, this is an outstanding read, and it was a ticket to a wondrous journey with its ups and downs, as we learn more about our characters, their motivations, and the world they inhabit. Parry’s writing is enchanting and lyrical, and she has quickly skyrocketed onto my must-read authors list. I recommend this for anyone who likes: historical fantasy, scary Faerie stories, dark academia, family secrets, and beautifully rendered stories.

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