Book Review: The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door
new favourite book since Lucy Holland's Sistersong
Synopsis
Clover Hill’s older brother Matthew returns from the Great War, still alive but struck by a faerie curse that can’t seem to go away. She learns about the existence of magic through the friend who had saved him, and is determined to learn it herself, in part to break the faerie curse and save her brother, and in part because she wants in on this exclusive world of magic and Families at the elite magical university of Camford, which she can only afford to attend through a scholarship. A conversation in the Camford library with Alden, the golden boy of her year, changes everything. Finding herself a tight circle of friends, with Alden himself, Hero, and Eddie, the four of them have the time of their lives as Camford freshmen, until an incident at Ashfield, Alden’s family estate, over their first golden summer together tears them and their world apart.
Review
The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door is a dark academia historical fantasy about elite circles and secrets, a broken system built on oppression, and the lengths we go to for those we love. Arguably, a lot of the characters and the unforgivable acts they commit are driven by love, and by revenge. It is about knowledge, about authorities forbidding knowledge to keep the secrets of their corrupt foundation. It is also about a young woman who yearns terribly for a place among the very elite that prefer to deny her existence, because her success undermines their belief in how special they are, how their magic and abilities are promised in their upper class blood.
The best dark academia books are those that don’t just romanticise to the aesthetic of Eurocentric systems of elite education, but dig into the truths behind the inequalities that are perpetuated through these institutions; they balance the beauty and passion of scholarship and a love for the contained environment enabling such pursuits with the ingrained issues of class war, colonialism, and oppression that these institutions don’t put enough effort into shaking off because of tradition, because of history and legacies. Similarly, I’d say the best fantasy books are those that comment on the flaws of an established system, even if it’s done in slant. Suffice it to say, The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door does both of these and more. It gives us a story of friendship, of the halcyon days of undergraduate campus adventures and the pursuit of knowledge in defiance of authority, and the repercussions of one transgression on the lives of the central group of friends, on their relationships, and what it means for the world they had always known.
[Spoilers ahead]
Everything in this book is intricately linked, from the faerie disaster that struck Matthew in Amiens, to Alden’s brother’s disappearance, to the forbidden knowledge hidden in the depths of Camford’s archives, to the fissures in the friend group’s relationships with each other after that fateful summer at Ashfield, right up to the magic system and the truth behind why the Families are said to have a stronger affinity to magic than regular folk. The author scatters little hints throughout the book, which only fall into place in retrospect—kind of like Tamsyn Muir’s The Locked Tomb series.
Clover Hill is our underdog protagonist: from a rural family and snubbed by most of her Camford schoolmates as “the scholarship witch”, she is always made to feel the outsider, the person who has to constantly prove that she too belongs at Camford, that she too has the right to learn magic like children from the Families, even if she didn’t grow up knowing about this world. And she wants nothing more than to belong to and be accepted into this world. Her ticket to belonging is her friendship with Hero and Alden, golden and brilliant, who risk very little in breaking the rules to dig up what the school is trying to keep buried and locked away, the knowledge about faeries and faerie curses, in light of what happened at Amiens.
What we find out from the faerie that had cursed Matthew, who turns out to be the same faerie that took Alden’s brother, is that the forbidden knowledge hidden in the depths of Camford’s archives isn’t banned books; it’s the truth behind why the Families have a stronger affinity to magic, and the violence that was needed for Camford to continue to exist, to preserve its legacy. The Families’ magic is not an innate inheritance, and mages are not born; they’re made, and to make them involves violence on another, on a faerie. Alden defends this practice, and Camford, on the basis that other countries had been doing it too, that it’s been done for centuries, that you can’t just tear down an established system no matter how broken it is.
In her acknowledgements, H G Parry wrote that this book is in part a tribute to the writers of the period around World War I, “who found themselves in a broken world and were determined to make a new one”. The book itself excavates the symptoms of that broken world: colonialism, class wars, legacies, and arguably even mankind’s dominance over anything they see as lesser if it means gaining more for themselves. This is how Camford came to be, how the Families came to be. The human tendency to justify dominance over any group they see as weaker, creating systems of power that have been in place for centuries; it justifies Camford’s breaking into fae country to build its legacy and success around a single faerie who must suffer for centuries (could this be similar to the dilemma in Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walked Away From Omelas”?). And on the other hand, how justified is the antagonistic dryad of this book in all the carnage she inflicted as collateral damage to save her loved one?
As Clover realises the truth about Camford, the reason for its uncanny plant life, she reflects, “I’d always loved that rustling overgrowth, but without thinking about it, I’d always considered it an invasion, weeds trying to colonise buildings that had stood for centuries. We were the invaders. All this time, it had been trying to break free.” She may not have had a hand in establishing Camford’s colonising legacy, but she had benefitted from it, just like any other mage who has passed through the halls of Camford, who had received an education from it.
Clover is aware that tearing her beloved Camford down to free the faerie is not as straightforward as it may sound in theory, because its system has been so ingrained. What can take the institution’s place, and will extricating and freeing the suffering being that had enabled Camford’s magic throughout these centuries bring everything about Camford crumbling down? Will it mean losing magic, the wonders of it, forever?
“Unfair or not, though, it was the world we lived in. Its roots ran deep, and tearing them up would mean tearing everything else up with it. Did I have the right to inflict that kind of trauma on a world that had already had its foundations shaken to the core? Surely there was still a better way, an easier way, a way to fix everything without breaking it first?”
One of my favourite quotes from this book, which I think encapsulates its message and intent, is this: “But the world had never been safe, not for everybody. It had been broken for a very long time, and the war had only shown those cracks for what they were. It couldn’t be patched over. It needed to shatter if it was ever to be rebuilt into something glittering and new.” In a way, it reminded me of RF Kuang’s Babel and its central conflict, but approached in a more hopeful light. The world can be fixed, little by little, and it may take forever, but the point is that change is possible.
There are 5-star reads, and there are 5-star reads that have me in such an intense chokehold that I can list off the few titles that made me feel this way—the last time I read such a book was back in 2022, when I read Lucy Holland’s Sistersong. The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door falls into the latter category. Other books that this one reminded me of are: Strange the Dreamer duology by Laini Taylor, Babel by RF Kuang, and Uprooted by Naomi Novik.