Book Reviews: Two fae (fairyfolk) fantasy novels

This month's new book reading kicked off with two tonally different but not lore-dissimilar fantasy books set partially or mostly within the realms of fae / fairy, both in terms of actual locations but also themes, characters and meanings. Both books were enjoyable (and substantially better than Weyward, the not-great witch book that closed out February reading), but ultimately, I think one was more successful than the other. I'm giving a genre-reader recommend to both (as you will see below!) but if you only want one fae-based fantasy for your lists, go with Greenteeth.

Commencing when Temperance Crump, a young wife and mother who is also a witch, is thrown into Jenny Greenteeth's lake to drown, and Jenny decides to rescue rather than eat her, this story rollicks around through England, Wales, Scotland and fairyland, and draws in a positive mash-up of folklore, Arthurian mythos, fae legends, and fantasy's greatest tropey hits. It is enjoyable, even very enjoyable, without being in any sense a flawless book.

This book's greatest strength by a country mile is its protagonist. Jenny, based on the river-hag legend from English folklore, is a wonderful, wonderful character - spiky and curious and warm-hearted and savage, and most importantly of all, very decidedly not human, while still parsing very relatable emotional beats. I liked her from the first page and never stopped (in fact, I liked all the other characters much less when they had conflict with her, and I thought she was in the right every time).

The story itself is a mixture of four of the most common fantasy tropes - Quest, Magic / Fae, Found Family, and Defeating the Big Bad Via Trickery. The most successful of these is the magic / fae, which, while sticking to well-trodden beats around high fae / common fae, the dreamlike and detached nature of fairy realms, and the "fading out" of fairy, is skilfully put together and internally consistent. The Wild Roads and the high fae court were described vividly, and the king and queen were compellingly sketched in a small number of highly effective scenes.

To me, the least compelling aspect of the book was the threefold Quest, which devolved into a pretty pointless macguffin hunt, especially as the clue was planted quite early on that the objects collected in the quests would be ultimately worthless and immaterial to the resolution.  I think that the only real purpose of the Quests at the end of the day was to fill up space and maybe try to increase the stakes, and actually I think it did increase the stakes somewhat but not because of the purpose of the quests themselves, but rather because of its impact on the third theme, Found Family.

I have a difficult relationship with Found Family in fantasy in particular. I think it is more often mangled than nailed as a plot device, especially with writers who shy away from any robust conflict between their forced-teaming grouping. I don't think it was 100% successful in this book, as Brackus Marsh, the goblin peddler who forms the third in the travelling band, never rose above a caricature to me and was only mildly interesting as an occasional prompter for Jenny's observations. However, the relationship between Jenny and Temperance was terrific, and I actually believed in it, all the more because of the very real and serious differences between them which are never glossed over or hidden. Their biggest conflict made absolute plot sense and the only thing I didn't like about it was that the writer decided to have Jenny apologise and back down, when in reality, Temperance should have (in my opinion!)

I won't say anything about the ending as that would be a spoiler and a half, but I will say it was pretty satisfying, even if not surprising. All in all, a really good, if not perfect, fantasy book that I would recommend to genre readers with no hesitation. 7.5/10

The third and final (?) book in the Emily Wilde series, this novel was also an enjoyable read, although, for me, less successful overall than Greenteeth, probably because I felt it had fully played out its schtick in the first two books in the series. 

The device that Fawcett uses is "academic studies of the fae" - not fairyfolk having their own universities (although that would be an interesting twist!) but rather, what if the fae and their realms were accepted reality, and there was a whole discipline of academia built around that fact. The protagonist, Emily Wilde, is a scholar in her early 30s at Oxford, building a career in cataloguing the types and tales of the courtly and common fae. This means a usually charming (but occasionally draggy) academia-lite written style, complete with footnotes. 

This device was set up very well by Fawcett in the first book in this series (to my mind, clearly the best of the three), along with the main plot engine, which is Emily's developing romance with her fellow scholar and (gasp! surprise!) actual fae prince in exile, Wendell Bambleby. Emily and Wendell have a great adventure in the first book, and I really enjoyed it. The second book was marred by the introduction of an extremely irritating and plot-pointless new character, Emily's niece Ariadne, and the book's overall arc was not as strong. This third and I believe final book in the series unfortunately continues the weakening of the central concept and the strong start, and while I did enjoy it moderately, I don't think it achieved its (or the series') potential.

My main three critiques of the book are:

1. It takes a reeeeeeeally long time to get going. The first 100 pages are an incredibly long-winded set-up of the central problem, where nothing very interesting happens and the only new characters introduced are boring as batshit.

2. I felt like, by focusing so intently on folktales (and in particular, one specific folktale), the book lost the "spirit of academic enquiry" that had made the first so fresh and interesting. Emily, understandably given the circumstances, does not read as an eternally curious academic anymore, but rather as a woman desperate to save her lover, which is totally fine if you like that kind of story but here's the thing - "*I do not really like that kind of story*.

3. I did not enjoy the heavy-handed moralising that underlay the resolution of the plot. I won't say more in the service of not spoiling, but ... yeah.

So, on balance, I would say if you read and enjoyed the first two, definitely read this one to close out the story; if you haven't read them, go back to book 1 and see how jazzed you are to continue after that (bearing in mind that book 1 is the strongest by a fair margin). 6.5/10 for me.