I saw the secret hidden deep within his eyes. Impossibly, it was sorrow. Not a fair one’s ephemeral mourning, but human sorrow, bleak and endless, a yawning chasm in his soul. No wonder I hadn’t been able to identify the flaw. That emotion didn’t belong to his kind. Couldn’t belong. [loc. 499]
Isobel is seventeen years old and lives with her aunt and her two not-quite-human 'sisters' in Whimsy, a land where it is always summer. She is the most renowned artist of her age: her Craft is portrait-painting, and her skills are much in demand among the fair folk, who cannot create anything new.
The fair ones pay for her work in carefully-phrased enchantments. Though they cannot lie, they delight in twisting words. ("In exchange for her twenty-two-inch waist, Mrs. Firth couldn’t speak any word beginning with a vowel.") They are bound by the conventions of courtesy and good manners, and they are incapable of feeling human emotions -- except perhaps for love, since there is the Good Law which prohibits love between human and fae. The current ruler of fairyland is the Alder King, the Lord of the Summer Court: hence Whimsy's eternal summer.
Then Isobel is rescued from a fairy beast (like the one that killed her parents) by a mysterious and beautiful gentleman who turns out to be Rook, the Autumn Prince and her newest client. When she paints his portrait, it reveals too much: it shows the almost-human sorrow in his gaze, and that will be seen as a sign of weakness by other fair ones. Furious, Rook abducts Isobel, intent on taking her for trial: but they become the prey of the Wild Hunt, and their relationship changes from that of captor and captive to something more nearly equal ... and dangerously emotional.
An Enchantment of Ravens is a charming and well-paced fantasy romance, with plenty of humour and some truly chilling depictions of the fair ones and their inhuman society. Here be monsters, and I don't just mean the creature that rises from the barrow-mound. I was especially taken with the notion that Isobel's Craft -- indeed, all human creativity -- was as much a mystery to the fae as their magic was to her.
I've called this a romance, but there is quite a bit more to it, including a Machiavellian plan to overthrow the Alder King; the constant threat/promise of the Green Well, from which a human may be permitted to drink and thus become an immortal fair one; the juxtaposition between illusion and reality (for instance, Rook's glamour versus his true appearance); and the ways in which the fair ones emulate humans without really understanding their actions.
There were a few points where I felt the world-building falter (usually when Isobel, who's grown up in eternal summer, thought about falling leaves or woolly jumpers: how would she know?) but on the whole An Enchantment of Ravens is a sustained and vivid depiction of the human and fairy lands, and the borders (literal and metaphorical) between them. An enjoyable and satisfying read, with a convincingly sensible and stubborn heroine, a clueless but powerful hero, and a splendid secondary character who drives the plot.
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