My recommendation for February is a Victorian Faerie Tale with a strong romantic element and an unusual heroine. Cruel Magic (2022) by American author E.B.Wheeler is the first in the Iron and Thorns trilogy. The second volume, Wild Magic was published in 2023 and the third, Fierce Magic, in 2024. All three volumes are easily available in paperback with splendid covers, or as ebooks.
The trilogy is set in a version of Victorian England under threat from Faerie Realms which most humans are unaware of. The Weaver family has recently moved from an industrial city to the pretty village of Drixton after a cruel sickness left two of the six Weaver daughters with permanent problems. Cassandra Weaver has weakened limbs on her right side and must wear a painful leg-brace or walk with a stick while her younger sister, Georgina, is now deaf. Mr Weaver is perpetually away on business while his wife awaits the birth of her seventh child. The Weavers were encouraged to move to Drixton by a local aristocratic family, the Ashbys, and eldest daughter Sophie Weaver has high hopes of being courted by handsome Robert Ashby. Their new home, and the ancient forest which surrounds it, seem idyllic but Cassandra is uneasy.
Cassandra’s instinct that something is wrong is quickly confirmed by two alarming incidents. Youngest daughter, Lottie, claims to have been lured into the forest and bitten by a faerie. Two strangers help Cassandra to find and heal Lottie – an arrogant medical student called Henry Stewart and his enigmatic Persian companion, Domin. A few days later, Cassandra and Georgina are attacked in the orchard by a huge ferocious hound. Cassandra fights back (with a croquet hoop) but Georgina is injured and they are only saved by the sudden arrival of a suspiciously well-armed young man from Utah, Jairus Hale. Cassandra has only encountered supernatural beings in the stories told by her old nurse. She doesn’t want to believe that faeries are real but odd things keep happening in Drixton, such as the sudden fracture of the church bells.
Cassandra is repeatedly told by her mother to curb her odd behaviour and try to behave like a normal young lady in search of a suitable husband. She is repelled by the attentions of an unpleasant scientist but finds herself increasingly attracted to the annoying Mr Stewart. At a ball attended by Cassandra and Sophie, two aristocratic friends of the Ashby family – the dashing Mr Fitzhugh and the beautiful Lady Amy – seem keen to get to know the sisters. Cassandra rapidly realizes that most guests at this ball, including her sister, are behaving strangely while outside the ballroom more of the terrifying hounds are gathering. In the aftermath of the disrupted ball, Cassandra and Jairus find themselves among the small number of people in Drixton who haven’t been reduced to a zombie-like state by some kind of enchantment.
Cassandra is anxious to protect her family and help the villagers but she isn’t sure who to trust, especially after Fitzhugh, Amy, Henry and Domin are all revealed to be part of the non-human world. Jairus admits that he came to Drixton on the trail of a sinister Occult group known as the Grigori but soon realized that there were other dark forces stirring. This is confirmed by Henry who fears that four powerful Queens of Faerie are converging on Drixton and that for some reason their interest is centred on the Weaver family. It is bad news for Changeling Henry who has been hiding from one of the Queens – his captor, Titania, Lady of the Woods. Cassandra refuses an offer from Fitzhugh to keep her family safe in one of the darkest of the Faerie Courts and chooses to let Domin and Henry lead her to a temporary sanctuary in another part of Elfland.
As magic and monsters gather, Cassandra makes the decision to fight for her family and village. Her allies are a once-human prince who has been forced to serve a cruel Faerie Queen for centuries, a shape-shifting daemon bound to protect a royal dynasty, an exiled Faerie princess with a reputation for treachery to live down, a monster-hunter who believes that he can hear the voice of God but who may have a painful secret in his past, and a lonely Faerie Changeling afraid of her own powers. Can this disparate group stay true to each other, survive the monsters, and discover what the Faerie Courts and the Grigori are planning before it is too late?
I promised you an unusual heroine. Cassandra Weaver is an intellectually curious young woman with an inborn resistance to magic. What makes her special is not that she is disabled (this is becoming quite common in today’s `inclusive fiction’) but the authenticity with which Wheeler writes about her. Wheeler has given Cassandra the condition she suffers from herself – hemiplegia, a partial paralysis of one side of the body. Cassandra and Georgina are presented as victims of Scarlet Fever, a disease prevalent in the 19th century which often killed young people or left them with lifelong problems. Victorian attitudes to disability are also sharply portrayed as Cassandra is cruelly mocked for being a `cripple’. Even members of her own family are embarrassed by what they see as Cassandra’s defects and urge her to disguise them as much as possible. Cassandra bravely endures pain and exhaustion, particularly when her focus is on helping others. Although this is Fantasy fiction, she doesn’t suddenly turn into a Buffy-style superheroine and there is no magical cure for her condition. Cassandra’s strengths are mental and emotional and what she needs most is someone who can accept and love her as she is.
February is traditionally the month when thoughts turn to romance and Romantasy is one of the biggest trends in publishing at the moment, though it is treated with derision by most literary editors and critics. One consequence of this is that books such as the Iron and Thorns Trilogy now tend to be promoted as Romances aimed at young women rather than as Fantasy adventures which might appeal to readers of any age and gender. I think this is a pity and often misleading. Cruel Magic has equal numbers of important female and male characters and they share the narrative viewpoints. The male characters are as complex and interesting as the female ones. To take just one example, sharp-shooting, God-fearing Jairus is not the sort of hero who features much in modern Fantasy but Wheeler managed to make me feel fond of this dedicated monster-hunter.
Wheeler has written books which are primarily Romances, such as her entertaining Dragons of Mayfair series (2021-2025), but the Iron and Thorns Trilogy is better described as Dark Fantasy. It begins as if it is going to be a typical Historical Romance about a group of sisters looking for love and marriage but these sisters are rapidly caught up in exciting adventures involving struggles with powerful magics, terrifying monsters, evil cults, ancient deities and ruthless faeries. The wicked aristocrats and mad scientists plotline is the least original part of the trilogy but Wheeler still manages to write about most of her villains with compassion. Cruel Magic has a satisfying story arc that culminates in the winning of one battle. In the second and third volumes, a whole magical war will take Cassandra and her allies on dangerous journeys throughout Britain.
If you are looking for a romantic read, you won’t be short-changed. Romantic relationships do develop amongst the group of allies and with characters who join the struggle later in the story, such as spirited artistic younger sister, Georgina. By the end of the trilogy there are five happy couples but all of them have had to come through major changes and find new roles in life before they can be together. Thus a pair of immortals who have been on opposing sides have to learn to forgive and trust each other, while the young man in another potential pairing has been following a dark path but there is still time for him to turn back. The central couple, Cassandra and Henry, play the traditional roles of doomed lovers. Cassandra is a loveable Cinderella figure who meets an actual prince but Prince Henry was abducted from the British royal family centuries before. He has acquired powerful magic, done some terrible things, and almost lost touch with his original human nature. A jealous Fairy Queen will never let him marry and live a normal life. It seems impossible for Cassandra and Henry to be together in the human world so a more radical solution has to be found.
I should perhaps make it clear that the Iron and Thorns Trilogy does not contain any of the kind of explicit sex scenes which have caused some recent novels written by women to be insultingly labelled as `Fairy Porn’. It rather seems that male authors can put as much (often violent) sex as they like into their Fantasy fiction but when female authors do it they are accused of writing pornography. Some of these authors, particularly the American ones, have also been criticized for misappropriating Celtic mythology for unworthy purposes. Speaking as a British person of part English and part Celt descent, I personally have no objection to authors of any nationality drawing on British myths, legends and folklore as long as they are genuinely inspired by them and do their research. Wheeler (who also writes Historical Fiction) has clearly been diligent in her research on British history, Celtic mythology and English Fairy Lore. She takes her faeries seriously and brings alive all the traditional beauty and cruelty of the Seelie and Unseelie Courts and the terror of the Wild Hunt.
Wheeler explores the darker aspects of Victorian science and I particularly enjoyed the way she invents supernatural explanations for some historical facts – such as the tragic loss of all Queen Anne’s children or the plot to blow up King James I/VI. Given notoriously superstitious James’ hatred of magic, why wouldn’t faeries be behind the Gunpowder Plot? One of the trilogy’s most alarming villains, Changeling Jane Tudor, behaves with all the ruthless ambition you would expect from a Tudor princess raised in a court even crueller than that of her original family.
Wheeler’s sensitive treatment of changelings (babies switched by the faeries) is one of the things that gives depth to the Iron and Thorns Trilogy. The emphasis in folklore and Fantasy fiction has generally been on rescuing human children held captive in the Faerie Realms. Of the two Human Changelings among the main characters in this trilogy, one longs to return to the human world but the other is only interested in conquering it. More unusually there are two sympathetic main characters who are Faerie Changelings who have grown up in the human world, failing to fit in and eventually realizing that they have been abandoned by their Faerie mothers. Faeries are traditionally heartless parents but Wheeler explores other possible reasons for their behaviour and by the last book of the trilogy helping changelings of both kinds becomes a priority for Henry and Cassandra. Stories about changelings probably resonate with me because I am adopted but anyone who feels out of place in the world they have been brought up in will appreciate these thoughtful novels. Until next month…
Geraldine
February 2025