#regency fantasy

So. I was extremely a Gail Carson Levine kid (stay with me, I swear this is relevant). Ella Enchanted was my entire personality for a number of years, and I even watched and have a delightful soft spot for the Anne Hathaway film adaptation that barely has a passing resemblance to the book. All this to say, the idea of obedience being a curse was not new for me, but where Ella had a little wiggle room in that curse, poor Cordelia is in HELL. Ella still had like...physical control over her body. Cordelia is getting puppeted to the Nth degree. She is pushed down in her own body for DAYS, has no physical control, and honestly by the end of chapter 1, I was convinced it was a miracle she wasn't utterly mad.

By whom is Cordelia being puppeted, you ask? Evangeline, her mother. Not evil stepmother. Not fairy godmother. HER. MOTHER. Who, very much in line with evil mothers everywhere, does not see Cordelia as her own person so much as she is an extension of Evangeline. In this case, Evangeline takes this a half step farther and decides that Cordelia not only doesn't get privacy or a personality, but also doesn't get bodily autonomy. It's GRIM.

Early on, Evangeline loses her benefactor, and has to go find another one, which is where she manipulates things into being invited to stay with the Squire (he has a name but he's the Squire) and his sister, Lady Hester. Hester is the best ever. She's in her 50s, her knees are going, and she clocks Evangeline within about 0.0001 nanoseconds. She also clocks that Cordelia is SUPER not ok within the first oh, twelve hours of her being in the house or so? And Hester knows pretty much instantly that she is about to be wrapped up in preventing Evangeline from marrying her brother and getting Cordelia away from her hideously abusive mother. While dealing with her own second-chance romance with eminently eligible bachelor Richard Evemore. It's a glorious game and it plays out in a way where I literally couldn't put this book down.

The time period and setting is a little nebulous, which honestly is fine, but it reads regency to me, which I adored.

I also need to address how this is low-key the anti horse-girl book (You guys, I hyphenated and re-hyphenated that term so many times, but I think this hyphenation correctly communicates what I want. It's not anti-horse-girl, it's anti the genre of horse-girl books). Evangeline's familiar, Falada, is a demon shaped like a horse. When Cordelia is a child, Falada is her constant companion and confidant. UNTIL the day she tries to run away on him and it is revealed that Falada has been telling Evangeline EVERYTHING. Remember, he's not a horse, he's only horse-shaped. So he's been spilling every one of Cordelia's closest secrets to her mother for her entire life. THAT betrayal ends with Cordelia actively murderous, and frankly I cannot blame the girl. Falada is THE WORST on a very personal level. It's not comparable to the depth and scope of her mother's betrayal and abuse, but Falada is an easier target.

So much so that when Cordelia, Hester, and Richard are working out how to strip magic from magical beings, they use Falada as an experimental subject. This ends with the magical glowy horse-shaped demon beheaded, head burned to nothing, and body buried six feet under. Then, the next morning, Falada claws his way out of his grave and starts murdering people.

I cannot say "fuck this horse" with any more emphasis. This is the WORST horse.

This story is 100% Cordelia's and Hester's, but the world is absolutely airtight in terms of feeling real and the side characters being people rather than plot devices. Everyone we see matters, everyone we see has hopes and dreams and personality. This is true from Hester's lady friends to the servants to the absurdly personality-filled gander who steps to the headless demon horse. I just love how immersive this world and the characters are.

Long-Tailed Feelings and Regency Fairy Tales

Olivia Atwater's Half a Soul was an absolutely fascinating combination of everything I loved about Regency romance and all the best bits of fairy tales. There are no "candy floss fairies" here; the fae are threatening, dangerous, and genuinely terrifying if you land on the wrong side of them. Let's talk Dora and Elias.

Unquestionably, the best part of this book is the unconventional protagonists. For everyone who thought "Mr. Darcy was cool, but make him GRUMPIER," I give you Elias Wilder, the Lord Sorcier. Elias is rude, curt, and utterly fails to suffer fools for longer than 0.0001 milliseconds. Balance that against actual brilliance, a very deeply buried squishy center, and an infallible moral compass, and he is one of the more interesting, prickly, and weirdly endearing love interests I've seen in a while.

Opposite Elias is Theodora "Dora" Ettings, who had half her soul stolen by a fairy when she was a child. He'd have gotten her whole soul, except that her cousin stabbed the fairy with a pair of iron bird scissors that Dora subsequently wears around her neck. The very cool thing about Dora is that after half her soul is stolen away, she only feels, as she describes them, "long-tailed feelings." This causes her all sorts of grief socially, and her mother and aunt never truly accept Dora as she is. The incredible thing is that Dora herself DOES. She is given the opportunity to reunite the two halves of her soul in adulthood, and doesn't do it. So I am here for and love a protagonist who owns how awesome she is.

Elias and Dora are what I would call an unconventional pair, but that quote simply makes them more interesting to watch. I highly recommend this regency fantasy fairy tale romance, and I cannot wait to read the next two in this trilogy!

Oh You NEVER Introduce Yourself to Fae...

Miss Euphemia Reeves begins her fairy tale by making a cardinal mistake: she offers her full name to Juniper Jubilee, the Lord Blackthorn. And then Lord Blackthorn promptly appoints himself Effie's fairy godfather and is so damn enthusiastic and desperate to help that he becomes the single biggest obstacle to Effie fulfilling her fairy bargain. Let's talk Ten Thousand Stitches.

There are two major things I love about this book. First, I love that it does not frame anger as an inherently negative thing that needs to be gotten rid of or overcome; in point of fact, anger is what saves the day in this fairy tale. That actually gives Effie a real Sam Vimes vibe, truth be told, but we'll come back to that. Second, I actually loved how much of the book I spent yelling "HE LOVES YOU, OPEN YOUR EYES AND SEE IT" at Effie. Our girl is here for class solidarity and equitable treatment of servants, but wow can she not see true love when it's standing in front of her with puppy dog eyes.

Effie's two main plotlines are full on coming for the family she works for because they are abusing and exploiting their servants, and trying to get Benedict to fall in love with her. One of these goes significantly better than the other, because Effie turns out to be a magician whose magic works through embroidery. And this is where I want to really dig into how anger is handled in this novel.

As someone who was femme socialized in the 90s and early 00s, I definitely got the "anger and noise are not feminine, don't do that" and "anger is an inherently bad emotion." (To clarify: I did not get this from my parents, they were great. I got this from the REST of society.) Now as a grown-ass adult woman with some serious social justice and disability justice axes to grind, I have exactly zero time for moralizing about emotions. They exist, its on us to deal. And Effie's anger is characterized in terms like "bright" and "sharp" and "shining," which is a really lovely change from the deep black cesspool characterization that we usually see.

Atwater understands that anger can be motivating, can be the part of you that KNOWS you have more value than you are being treated with, and that cares deeply for you and the people around you. And Effie can imbue her embroidery with anger that motivates people to keep going, to change things for the better. This is anger that inspires. It's a complex, nuanced, adult living in a capitalist hellscape exploration of anger and its place. And y'all...I am here for it. I love how this is handled in the book.

If I'm being honest, the romance was my least favorite part of this book, because Effie inspiring the servants to basically informally unionize and fight for better lives for all of them is just so, so good, and feels so topical and relevant. And also, Effie just GETS this process, especially once its pointed out to her that she can work her anger magic intentionally. She is nowhere near this good at matters of the heart.

Overall, this was a very fun read, and honestly as a regency fairy tale, I think it hits strong.

Fairy Tales of Love and Death

In the afterword to this book, Olivia Atwater says:

"I am not fond of death. I feel strange that I even have to write those words, but apparently I do. For some reason, we are surrounded by stories which romanticise death, and which imply that people who refuse to accept death are doing the world some sort of moral disservice. Obviously I do not think that accepting death is a virtue."

Someday I need to inject this quote into the brains of every doctor, nurse, CDC director, and world leader who had any say whatsoever in public health policy in the year of our lord 2023. Not to mention literally everyone who has ever thought that disabled or chronically ill people are better off dead. Because that romanticization exists, and somehow it got tied up in a really ugly way with ableism.

And then with her whole chest, Atwater told a story in which not only does almost nobody die, but at least one person is resurrected. Let's talk Longshadow.

*Spoilers abound below the break, so be warned!*

Fairy tales have an actively weird relationship with love and death. By courting one, you're often courting the other in fairy tale settings, and Miss Abigail Wilder ends up doing that QUITE LITERALLY. When Mercy Midnight gets caught in the bedroom of a girl who died suspiciously by the Lord Sorcier's beloved adopted daughter, our girls get right down to the business of falling in love while trying to solve a fae-based murder mystery.

There are so many beautiful little moments in Abigail and Mercy's relationship. Abigail realizing she is falling in love. Mercy dressing Abigail in midnight. Abigail speaking in support of Mercy to Other Mum. Hugs. Little touches. The desire for mutual belonging. The really lovely little motif of imagination, and Mercy actively making choices to revive Abigail's neglected imagination. Everything about this relationship is warm and soft and trusting...even once it's revealed that Mercy actually is Lord Longshadow, and is herself a sluarch.

Sluarch is the term Atwater uses in this story rather than psychopomp (creatures who guide the souls of the deceased to the afterlife; there are versions of these in every religion and culture), and they are tied into raven imagery, but they are themselves fairies, so all the usual rules apply. The sluarchs we meet are all just brimming with personality, and honestly they are just as wonderful as Lady Hollowvale and Mr. Jubilee, in their own ways.

The evening of the Spring Equinox was cool and balmy, just as the weather wizards had--for once!--reliably predicted. The glittering guest list for the Harwoods' annual ball was exactly to Amy Standish's design. As she prepared to descend into the lake that gently rippled, reflecting the full moon and stars, outside the grandeur of Harwood House, Amy knew she had organized the most important night of her life to absolute perfection. The only tiny, insignificant task left to do was to propose marriage to the right man by the end of this evening. Then she would finally win everything she had ever dreamed of, and it would be utterly perfect. She knew it.

-- Spellswept

Of course, a sensible woman would never have accepted the invitation in the first place. To attend a week-long house party filled with bickering gentleman magicians, ruthless cutthroat lady politicians, and worst of all, my own infuriating ex-fiancé? Scarcely two months after I had scandalized all of our most intimate friends by jilting him? Utter madness.

-- Snowspelled

It was bad enough to be deprived of my new husband before our wedding night. It was utterly unjust to be tormented by nightmares weeks afterward as I slept, still alone, in our marital bed. For the ninth morning in a row, I woke up gasping and clawing at my throat, fighting to yank piercing thorns out from my skin...thorns that, of course, existed nowhere but in my dreams.

-- Thornbound

Dressing for a ball would always be a challenge for any lady who found it easier to analyze--from memory--an obscure spell from two centuries ago than to remember which sleeve lengths were currently fashionable across the nation. But dressing for a ball at Angland's first women's college of magic, where at least half the dancers were certain to add competitive spellwork to their costume and the enigmatic local fey were likely to make an appearance? That raised the standards--and the stakes--enormously.

-- Moontangled

There was this much to be said, Honoria supposed, for comprehensive public and personal ruin: once all that she'd ever cared about had been ripped from her grasp, she no longer had anything left to fear.

-- Spellcloaked

There was a fine line between ambition and foolishness, and I had spent most of my life walking it. Still, as looked around the crowded, fey-lit dining tables at Thornfell College of Magic for Young Women on the eve of our second Winter Solstice, I was forced to admit that--just this once--I might have aimed my goals a bit too high.