2024 is a great fall for well-crafted fantasy fiction with a literary bent. 'The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door' is a must for any adult who still yearns to open a door and find themselves in Narnia (or some other fantastical world. Or had ever dreamed of other lands among the dreaming spires of Oxford like CS Lewis and JRRR Tolkein.
This book's getting the rare 5th star from me.
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I'm right there with The Scholar (a teen named Clover) every step of her journey from the struggling family farm - struggling because her older brother was gravely wounded in WW1 and their father died in the Spanish Flu - to the dreamy spires of a fictional Camford: the secret magical university accessible through a door in the Bodleian library in Oxford or its Cambridge equivalent. The world of post-WW1 England, the elegant yet practical language, the relationships between students and their parents, even the mysterious world of the university Board and its sociopolitical secrecy, all feel real and complex and totally immersive even before Clover and her coterie get serious about opening the titular Door.
This is the familiar school of magic trope with an older cast and the richness of British university tradition behind it. In time and in literary space, think 'The Magicians' meets 'Jonathan Strange' with a grim undercurrent from CL Polk's 'The Midnight Bargain' (which also deals with magical post-war trauma of a similar-feeling era).
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