The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door
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4.5 • 12 Ratings
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- $1.99
Publisher Description
From the author of The Magician's Daughter comes The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door, a mythic, magical tale full of secret scholarship, faerie curses, and the deadliest spells of all—the ones that friends cast on each other.
All they needed to break the world was a door, and someone to open it.
Camford, 1920. Gilded and glittering, England's secret magical academy is no place for Clover, a commoner with neither connections nor magical blood. She's there only to find a cure for her brother Matthew, one of the few survivors of a deadly faerie attack on the battlefields of WWI.
When Clover catches the eye of golden boy Alden Lennox-Fontaine and his friends, doors that were previously closed to her are flung wide open, and she soon finds herself enmeshed in the seductive world of the country's magical aristocrats. But the summer she spends in Alden’s orbit leaves a fateful mark: months of joyous friendship and mutual study come crashing down when experiments go awry, and old secrets are unearthed. The consequences will only be truly understood many years later, when it's too late...
"Part historical fantasy, part campus novel, and entirely magical. An unputdownable, bittersweet tale." —Allison Saft
“By turns wondrous, haunting, and mysterious. Historical fantasy at its finest." —Olivia Atwater
"A brilliant story of magic and scholarship and ambition. A marvelous, thought-provoking, captivating novel." —Kat Howard
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Parry (The Magician's Daughter) skillfully weaves together the mysterious and the mundane in this ambitious historical fantasy about hidden magic, dangerous ambition, and familial loyalty. In 1918, the accidental summoning of a fairy during the last days of WWI leaves many dead and a few survivors horribly cursed, prompting the secret magical community to prohibit any further dealings with the fae. Two years later, farmgirl Clover Hill enrolls at Camford, England's prestigious university for the sorcerous arts, intent on breaking her brother's increasingly debilitating fae curse. Though she's scorned as a double rarity—a woman and a scholarship student—she manages to befriend dashing, aristocratic Alden Lennox-Fontaine, fellow female scholar Hero Hartley, and botanist Eddie Gaskell. This quartet boldly pursues the forbidden secrets of the fae until they finally succeed in unlocking a door into Faerie country. Eight years later, the four have grown apart, haunted by the consequences of their actions. But when one of Clover's former friends goes rogue, threatening to upset the balance of power, Clover must stop them, in the process discovering Camford's deepest secrets. Parry paints a picture of a bygone era that is both attractive and subtly rotten at the core, exploring issues of power and privilege, duty and obligation. The results are complex, introspective, and impressive.
