Review: The King of Faerie

The King of Faerie by A.J. Lancaster
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a consistently excellent series (start at the beginning; it's a continuous story, though each book has its own resolution). Well edited, apart from the occasional unnecessary "!?" and a few very minor glitches; full of vivid characters, some of whom are wonderfully determined to do the right thing; with a marvelous and fresh-feeling setting that nevertheless evokes both Fae lore and British tradition.

I do have a minor quibble, which I've mentioned in reviews of earlier books: this is a Britain (or Prydain) where the religion is Celtic paganism, and yet several characters (Jonathan, John, and James) unaccountably have biblical names. Apart from that, the worldbuilding is excellent. A lot of books that present a society that goes back for centuries don't give me the feel of antiquity that, say, a British book set in the real world does, with its odd traditions that make no sense but are kept up because that's the way things have always been. This book does give me that. It's a parallel-world Britain where the details are all different, but the overall feel of it is the same.

There's an old family manor. It's dilapidated in parts, it's been renovated and built onto and rooms repurposed dozens of times, the rooms have names that no doubt all have histories behind them, a big extended family lives there (and argues constantly, but ultimately pulls together in the face of an external threat), and it's completely wonderful and evocative.

The fae are unpredictable and alluring and dangerous, sometimes cruel, always fascinating. But Wyn, the fae prince who is one of the central characters, is a kind and good-hearted man who's lived as a human for years and is only just now returning to reluctantly embrace his fae side. That's a theme: if you don't acknowledge who you are and live that out, you're buying yourself a world of trouble and weakening yourself as well. (A book having that kind of a theme, and working it out successfully, is one of my criteria for a five-star rating.)

And then there's Hetta. The book would be worth reading for Hetta alone; she's determined, steadfast, forthright (which both the fae and her fellow humans tend to find some combination of amusing and offensive), and takes no crap from anyone, no matter how powerful, even though she's only the lord of a small faeland that's also an estate in the human world. She's pregnant, to her fiancé Wyn, which in her society is scandalous; she has no time for people's moral panic about it when there's a ticking clock to resolve a series of difficult problems in order to save everything that matters to her. She's not perfect or flawless or overpowered; she struggles both internally and externally throughout the book, but, as she says at one point, "Monsters first; self-doubt later." I love how pragmatic and sensible she is. (It's a characteristic that New Zealand women often have, in my experience, and the author is a fellow New Zealander.) She and Wyn form a powerful team; both racked by self-doubt but with full confidence in each other, she pragmatic and blunt, he organized and diplomatic, both thrown into a sea of chaos mostly not of their own making, and swimming strongly for an at first invisible shore.

I always enjoy it when I find an author who can set up a series of problems that I can't see a solution to, and I look forward to seeing how they resolve them. This book is particularly successful in that regard, and (vaguely to avoid spoilers) involves plenty of agency from the key characters and zero fortunate coincidences in the actual resolution, too. It manages to pull off "surprising but inevitable," and that's hard.

I pick up a lot of bad books in my search for books like this, so I know what the average writer is capable of. This is the work of a writer who is well above average. It fully deserves a high spot on my Best of the Year list for 2023.

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