The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door by H.G. Parry: Review by Colleen Mondor
The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door, H.G. Parry (Redhook 978-0-316-38390-5, $19.99, 464pp, tp) October 2024. Cover by Lisa Marie Pompilio.
The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door by H.G. Parry ostensibly opens in a secret college magically located between Cambridge and Oxford (aka Camford, “the Cambridge-Oxford University of Magical Scholarship”). But the foreshadowing for a far larger story is set in the first pages, when protagonist Clover Hill begins to relate the saga of her older brother, Matthew, a veteran of the First World War. Matthew went to war for reasons that will be familiar to any reader of Great War literature; “the war will over in a few months,” he told his sister. “The farm will be fine without me until then. It might be the only chance I get to see the world. Besides, I should be out there. Everyone my age is going.”
Oh, Matthew. It’s going to go so badly for you and everyone you know.
As Clover reveals early on, something horrific happened to Matthew on the battlefield. In the midst of a firefight, a door to faerie was opened by a desperate soldier/mage and what came through was powerful, deadly, and uncontrollable. Few soldiers survived the onslaught, and those who did were initially kept away from their loved ones by the powerful magical families who forbid all knowledge of magic to outsiders. Matthew lived but was cursed and in the months since he came home, controlling that curse has become increasingly difficult. Clover resolves to bridge the gap between the magical and nonmagical and get into Camford, where she can hopefully learn a way to save Matthew. But something goes wrong in her quest, and years later, in 1929, she and three of her old friends must come together and find a way to seal the last door to faerie forever.
WHAT AN EPIC AND THRILLING NOVEL!
Parry does an outstanding job of blending the experiences of World War I veterans into the fantasy plot (she acknowledges the work of several authors from the period including Vera Brittain, Ford Maddox Ford, and Rebecca West), while also creating an academic setting that will be both familiar and unique. Clover and her friends, each of whom is harboring their own secrets and dreams, work to open a faerie door and find answers that might help Matthew. They struggle early on in their plan, however, because knowledge of faerie is strictly controlled since the war. Few students are interested in pushing at the boundaries put in place by the powerful magic families. That is partly due to the potential dire consequences but also because no one is very interested in fighting the status quo. They are all just so tired and traumatized from the war. (“My students today barely remembered what the generation above them was trying to forget,” Clover recalls later.) Clover, Alden, Hero, and Eddie discover that at Camford, magic is something to be studied only in the proper way, and not necessarily with an eye towards scholarship and learning. They resolve to fight against the constraints forced upon them by others and push, “To find the truth, even when that truth is something you wish could be different.”
But when you don’t learn how magic works, it is far too easy to make big mistakes when wielding it.
The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door has tons of atmosphere, lots of secrets, some very ugly truths, and a group of friends who are not as tight as Clover believes. They nearly destroy their world and then must risk everything to save it, while doing their best not to be killed in the process. Faerie is dangerous, but our world…. well, as Clover’s generation knows all too well, it’s not so friendly either. The horrors of World War I hang over every aspect of the narrative and infuse it with a weight that lifts the novel to a higher purpose. I loved The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door; it was one of the best pieces of literature I have read in far too long. (As I write this it is late November, and I cannot tell you how much this book kept me sane at the closing of the year.) Bravo, H.G. Parry. Bravo!
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This review and more like it in the January 2025 issue of Locus.
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