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

Published: October 22, 2024

Publisher: Redhook

Series: N/A

Genre: Fantasy

Pages: 464 (Paperback)

My Rating: 5 Stars

A copy of this book was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Synopsis:
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.

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The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door is a surprise favorite of 2024. Yes, the premise sounded exactly like something I would enjoy, but I didn’t expect to be swept away by the setting and the camaraderie between the main character and her group of Camford friends. If you’re looking for a fantastic magical school story, blended with a historical setting, and marvelous characters I would highly recommend you pick this up.

This follows Clover Hill,  a young girl who grew up on a farm in a country village. Her oldest brother joins the service during WWI and while she is filling in as eldest sibling, he is fighting in the front lines. When her family receives news that he was injured by a faerie curse during a summoning gone wrong, Clover is introduced to a world she could have never imagined. Being the intelligent and highly determined young woman she is, Clover begins studying magic in hopes that she will have enough skill to earn A scholarship to Camford so she might find a way to cure her brother. During her tenure, she becomes friends with a group of wealthy students who are also interested in researching faerie circles for reasons of their own, despite the strict ban on such studies.

I dearly hoped going into this that Clover wouldn’t be tragically bullied for being both a woman and at Camford on Scholarship. Fortunately for me, she is quickly taken in by Alden, Hero, and Eddie, a trio of students from magical families who’ve been friends since childhood though that’s not to say that others don’t look down on her for her gender and circumstances. The trio are a delight and I truly loved the pages spent detailing their friendship and how Clover seemed to fit in so well, making them a quartet. Alden clearly has some sort of goal behind his research, though it doesn’t become clear what that goal is until much later in the book. Hero wants to do well so she can continue her education and not be married off to another son from a magical family. Eddie is mostly happy to go along with his friends and learn something interesting, especially if it might further his research on magical plant properties.

This book actually covers a fairly large timespan, from the years Clover is home waiting to hear from her brother, to the years of schooling, and then eight years later when the four friends have gone their separate ways but have to face the consequences of what their research did. I liked Clover’s character growth and I like that this has what feels like a proper, post-university epilogue thanks to the time skip. There’s never enough detail on what the characters get into after school and this gives it to the reader in heaps, though not all of it is good. 

Overall, I had a fantastic time reading The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door and it’s my favorite book by H.G. Parry yet!