A young woman's experience of building friendships and studying curses at an elite magical university sheds light on tensions between the classes, the changing face of war in the early 20th century, and the perils of empire in The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door, a vivid and moving historical fantasy from H.G. Parry (A Radical Act of Free Magic; The Magician's Daughter).
Clover and her brother Matthew both longed for new experiences when they were growing up in their small village in Lancashire. Clover had planned to become a teacher to help her family, but when Matthew returns from the Great War suffering from a faerie curse, she learns of the "magical world that lurked in the corners of our own--the world of mages and scholars, of hedgewitches and spellbooks and old Families." Determined to cure her brother, Clover wins a scholarship to the elite and magical Camford University. There she forms unlikely friendships with golden boy Alden Lennox-Fontaine, impossibly elegant Hero Hartley, and shy, eccentric botanist Eddie Gaskell. But the experiments they undertake uncover dangerous secrets, and not only does their joyous idyll come crashing down but its repercussions also come back to haunt Clover in the years to come.
Parry impeccably conveys the bonds of young friendship, the kind that's a love like no other and can cause pain like nothing else. The beating heart of those friendships keeps Clover's story grounded in reality even as she and her friends speculate about where, exactly, their university is physically located and experiment with forbidden faerie magic. Fans of V.E. Schwab will be enthralled. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library