Book Review : The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door

I received this book for free from Orbit Books in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door by H.G. Parry
Published by Redhook on October 22, 2024
Genres: Academia, Fantasy
Pages: 464
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Source: Orbit Books

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.

The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door is the second of H.G. Parry’s works that I’ve read, the first being The Magician’s Daughter. The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door had the same sumptuous magical setting as the author’s first work, but for me, surpassed the other novel in every other way. I was immediately sucked into the dark academic world, ensnared by the found family and their somewhat enmeshed relationships, and intrigued by the unique magic system and portrayal of faeries.

 

In all honesty, The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door is my favorite work of dark academia that I’ve read yet. Though I enjoyed other works of the genre, like Babel, The Scholomance trilogy, and The Atlas Six, all of them were missing a certain indescribable something that The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door achieves effortlessly. The novel manages to capture a quietly electrifying feeling that the secrets of the universe lay beneath the pages of the right book or in an undiscovered secret of the mysterious library of the magical school, Camford, if one only knows just where to look. And if that feeling isn’t exactly what dark academia is about, I don’t know what is.

 

“In the end, it was four words that changed the course of our lives, and the history of the world. Perhaps it wasn’t really so surprising. They were, after all, the most important words in any language. ‘What are you reading?’”

 

To top off this spectacular atmosphere that permeates every page of The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door is the incredibly compelling cast of characters. The narrator of the novel, Clover Hill, is an impoverished farm girl who dares to raise her sights to learning magic, despite not being from one of the powerful Families, who are born with a natural proficiency for magic. With plenty of determination and a new scholarship in hand, Clover enters Camford with the goal of soaking up every bit of knowledge about magic she can, and, oh yeah, saving her older brother from a deadly magical faerie curse.

 

Along the way, she falls in with a motley crew of other Camford students who come from powerful Families: Alden, the charismatic, but selfish ringleader and his long-suffering childhood friend; Hero, who is similarly ambitious but pickier about the means to the end; Eddie, the reticent friend who is more at home with plants than people. I quickly grew to love every one of the cast of characters, who were all complex and felt like actual, flawed people with sometimes conflicting motivations. I loved learning more about the intricate give and take each one of these friends had, their childhoods, and their reasons for taking the actions they do. Like many close friendships, their found family has a good deal of complexities and contradictions, and it was truly a delight to watch all of it unfold as Clover becomes more and more enmeshed with their world.

 

“We were at a fragile truce. I couldn’t break it without returning home, and yet I was afraid that if I did, everything would shatter. Instead, I’d thrown myself into Camford life, and it was more than happy to swallow me whole.”

 

Despite loving the relationship between the characters, I sometimes struggled with Clover herself. I didn’t always like her, but I do think this is also what makes her such a great narrator. She’s not just an innocent, naive girl from the country blindly following her more worldly friends into trouble. Instead, she’s grasping, selfish, and curious to a fault. She has plenty of her own desires and isn’t afraid to go after them. It was honestly refreshing to read a female character like her, who is not only ambitious and hard, but also soft and caring.

 

“‘I can’t force you to help,’ Alden said into the silence. ‘I can’t even persuade you—I know you too well for that. But you want to open that door too. If we closed it without trying, you’d never forgive yourself.
‘Perhaps, I’ll never forgive myself for opening it…..’
‘Not as much as you’d regret never opening it at all,’ he said.”

 

I was also thrilled that a book about faeries didn’t spend a ton of time dedicated to romance. Now, don’t get me wrong, I like a good romance as much as the next person, but I loved reading about Clover’s hunger for knowledge and magical power more than her lust over a man. That isn’t to say that there is absolutely no romance in The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door, but it takes a back seat to the plot and character development, which I appreciated.

 

But I didn’t just love the immaculate vibes, the setting, or the morally gray characters, I also really enjoyed the representation of the faeries themselves. To be honest, I think I’ve about hit my saturation point for faeries, much like many of us did in the height of the vampire craze. I am tired of reading about fated mates and sensual faeries as love interests, so it was exciting to get back to the devious, deadly, and wild portrayal of everything faerie in The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door. The novel expertly breadcrumbs Clover, and in turn, the readers, about the faeries and their powers throughout, making for a very entrancing read.

 

I will say that I did struggle with the pacing of The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door at times. The pacing is not the most consistent, and some parts of the books are much slower than others. I also feel that if someone split up the different parts of the book from the whole, they wouldn’t always fit too well together, and would feel like pieces of completely different works. Despite this incongruity, the common themes of the novel keep the magical tapestry of the novel from fraying, and even when I wasn’t crazy about some parts of the book as the others, I was still invested in the outcome and what that meant for both the characters and their world.

 

“I had ripped open the world for exactly this….But all I could think, over and over again, was that I was in a story in which the foolish farmer’s daughter makes a bargain with a faerie that ends in her losing everything she loves.”

 

And without giving too much away, the outcome is more than worth any bumps in the pacing. I loved that Clover is faced with making a choice where there is no “right” decision to be made. Making the stakes even higher is that her selection would have repercussions for not just her friends, but the entire world as they all know it. The ending of the novel is both satisfying and bittersweet, and perfectly in line with the genre of dark academia, reminding readers that knowledge often comes at a high price.

 

I must say that The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door is the novel for readers who love dark academia, strong heroines, and morally gray characters. I feel like this novel improved upon everything from the author’s previous novel, The Magician’s Daughter, and I’m still thinking about The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door days later. I will definitely be keeping an eye out for any of H.G. Parry’s works.

 
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