An Enchantment of Ravens

Isobel is a prodigy portrait artist with a dangerous set of clients: the sinister fair folk, immortal creatures who cannot bake bread, weave cloth, or put a pen to paper without crumbling to dust. They crave human Craft with a terrible thirst, and Isobel’s paintings are highly prized among them. But when she receives her first royal patron—Rook, the autumn prince—she makes a terrible mistake. She paints mortal sorrow in his eyes – a weakness that could cost him his life.

Furious and devastated, Rook spirits her away to the autumnlands to stand trial for her crime. Waylaid by the Wild Hunt’s ghostly hounds, the tainted influence of the Alder King, and hideous monsters risen from barrow mounds, Isobel and Rook depend on one another for survival. Their alliance blossoms into trust, then love, violating the fair folks’ ruthless Good Law. There's only one way to save both their lives, Isobel must drink from the Green Well, whose water will transform her into a fair one—at the cost of her Craft, for immortality is as stagnant as it is timeless.

Isobel has a choice: she can sacrifice her art for a future, or arm herself with paint and canvas against the ancient power of the fairy courts. Because secretly, her Craft represents a threat the fair folk have never faced in all the millennia of their unchanging lives: for the first time, her portraits have the power to make them feel.

I've been dying to get my hands on An Enchantment of Ravens for a while now. I absolutely loved the concept and it sounded like if offered more than enough twists on some of the fantasy genre staples. And it absolutely delivered! It reads like a beautiful fairytale, but it doesn't take long for the cracks to show themselves and reveal a darkness below the surface. Rather like the story's "fair folk", who hide their repulsive true forms beneath a facade of beauty and youth, there's more here than meets the eye.

In recent years, faeries seem to have undergone the same nice guy makeovers as vampires. Far from being the monstrous creatures of myth, they're now portrayed as misunderstood, smoldering love interests whose possessive nature is passed off as romantic. For someone who grew up on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, believe me when I say vampires used to be cool. Ever since Twilight however, they've been something of a joke in pop culture; reduced to a punchline.

This story takes the fae back to their roots. Little details, like Rook not considering the fact that Isobel needs to eat or she'll die, and Isobel's early fae patron Gadfly talking about seeing a mortal "just the other day", when the man in question has in fact been dead for over 300 years, bring a realism that's sorely lacking in most fae-centric fantasy books. We're talking about a 17 year old human (because they're always 17!) and a centuries old faery, and more often than not the only reference authors give to their differences is bright eyes, pointy ear and maybe the odd fang. So I loved the realism in this book - if it can be called such a thing! The author has clearly done her research. There's a lot of inspiration from celtic mythology, but it goes far beyond character and place names. The concept of faeries as inhuman tricksters who are little more than withered corpses behind their glamour is pure old-school mythology and I loved it. I'm sick to the back teeth of fantasy novels romanticising faeries as a bundle of bulging biceps, smoldering eyes and toxic masculinity. After a glut of popular novels following this formula, An Enchantment of Ravens feels fresh.

Sure, the world-building does feel undeniably thin - there's so much that is mentioned in passing that practically begs to be explored - and the pacing of the story is lean almost to a fault, but it's nice to read a simply story told well, without feeling like the author is setting up sequels and novellas and spin-offs. I'd love to have known more about the Winter Hunt and the deliciously smarmy Hemlock, but those things wouldn't have been relevant to the story. The glimpses we do see - of a world trapped in eternal summer under the rule of the alder king and forests plagued by monstous, rotting abominations created from fae magic - offer hints of the world beyond Isobel and Rook's journey. On one hand, I really wanted to see more of it, but at the same time I admired the fact that the author focused solely on her story without getting distracted by useless side quests and pointless backstory.

I loved Isobel as a character! She was smart, resourceful and brave, and her wiley tricks for dealing with the fae made the idea that she could fall in love with one all the more hard-hitting. This clearly couldn't be some childish infatuation or romantic ideal; the character was simply too grounded for that. It was interesting to see a heroine actually confront and see the grotesque reality of eternal life. Again, sorry to keep banging this drum, but many authors seem to think that trapping their character like a bug in amber, keeping them young and beautiful forever, is somehow romantic because they can't deal with the sometimes unpleasant realities of mortality and ageing.

Isobel sees the chance of ageless eternity as a fate worse than death; a curse that will cost her the very thing that defines who she is and condemn her to an endless life of emptiness and detachment. It's an interesting take on the usual trope - rather than becoming a unique and special snowflake, that's exactly what Isobel doesn't want.

Rook was ... okay, I guess.The standoffish autumn prince was a bit too cold and inhuman for me to get hooked on initially, but he got better as the book went on and he started to thaw. He didn't really stand out as a particularly memorable character, which made it a bit hard to understand why Isobel fell so hard for him. Still, I did like the balance he struck in being protective without being possessive. Things started to fall apart for me however about three quarters of the way through when the story turned to Isobel and Rook confessing their love for each other and having to face the consequences of breaking the Good Law. I just did not feel for one second that this pair were in love. Sure, they say it a lot, but actions speak louder than words and, save for a bit of kissing, there's nothing in the pages that made me feel anything close to love between this pair. Maybe because both are so cold - Isobel has been raised to guard her life around faeries and Rook is an inhuman being who doesn't understand basic human concepts like eating and needing to sleep. There was no heat, no passion. I enjoyed Isobel's thought process as she dealt with being in love with Rook, acknowledging how ridiculous it was, but I still didn't feel it.

Despite the story being the Isobel and Rook Show most of the time, the supporting characters, when they popped up, were fantastic. Isobel's goats-turned-human-thanks-to-magic little sisters, March and May, were cute, and her fae patron Gadfly was an adorably absent-minded sweetheart (before twists in the story later on revealed him to be more of a trickster than Isobel ever imagined). Gadfly's niece Lark fitted the creepy kid quota perfectly - from turning Isobel into a rabbit and treating her like an exotic pet, she reminded me of Claudia in Interview with the Vampire; cute and childlike on the outside, but turned cruel and vindictive by her resentment at being an eternal child.

The ending was pretty abrupt and I'm still not sure if it set up a happy ending or not, but it was a near perfect end to a wonderful story. An Enchantment of Ravens is a whimsical fairytale that manages to feel traditional and fresh at the same time.