2020 fantasy romance, first of a series. Theodora Ettings meets a
fairy lord in the woods, and half her soul is stolen before her cousin
Vanessa can rescue her. With her emotions largely missing, can she
avoid scandal long enough to see Vanessa though her Season in London?
Oh, now this is interesting indeed. The setting is a lightly
fantasied-up Regency, with balls and dresses and attractive gentlemen
(and terrifying fair folk lurking in the wild places). But it's also
a Regency with workhouses and plagues, and indeed a hero with
post-traumatic stress and a heroine whose flattened affect is the
despair of the relatives who'd like to see her fit into Society. Of
course she isn't expected to make a dazzling match like her beautiful
cousin, but…
There's a lot here of the frantic matchmaking done behind the scenes
by older women, and not only how it's frustrating and unpleasant for
the victims, but how the perpetrators have good reasons for doing it:
a young lady only has a season or two in which to attract a proposal,
or she'll be a burden on her more successful relatives for the rest of
her life.
On the male side there's the Lord Sorcier, a hero of the war and
ennobled in consequence but very clearly not really fitting into
police society. Not to mention his determination to tear it all down
and eliminate poverty and abuse, and his inability to keep quiet when
he sees what's wasted on a fancy dinner or ball while people are
starving in the streets. (Yes, it's common for an historical novelist
to give her favoured characters modern attitudes to get the reader in
sympathy with them, but Atwater realistically portrays the horror with
which someone expressing such ideas would have been met.)
It's all rather splendid. Fae are genuinely inhuman as well as
terrifying. Human evil is still human evil even if the fae enable it.
The heroes are unconventional but make it work. The setting is a
combination of excellent research with the implications of occasional
magic. I've very much enjoyed both of Atwater's books I've read so
far.