Damien Kelly

This is my fifth book of HG Parry’s and she never fails to impress. Like The Magician’s Daughter before it, this is a gentler, more involved story than the Magical Histories. But this also has a fullness that the previous book did not, following every moment of the deep friendships that this book is about before launching into its latter-day crisis. Rich, indulgent, we follow the whole of Clover Hill’s introduction to a secret world of magical Families and the magical university that binds them all together. We ser her whole life woven into those of her three best friends, all Family members and lifelong magic users, as she enjoys the wealth, privilege and power that these associations bring. But this is a world of isolationism, class and colonialism that points to something truly rotten at its core and, in dabbling with the faerie magicks that threaten this world, Clover and her friends commit precisely the kinds of crimes that unearned power lead to. Undoing those crimes becomes the work of their lifetimes.

This story is opulent and warm and nostalgic, but also marked by cruelty, deception and betrayal. If F Scott Fitzgerald had written more fantastically, this is what he’d have written. Loved it. More please.

My thanks to Little, Brown Book Group UK for providing this ARC.