Margaret Rogerson’s An Enchantment of Ravens Is an Instant Fantasy Classic

Or, in the case of Enchantment, for their Craft. Whimsy is a town soaked in magic perched at the edge of a fairy wood, that runs on the creation of human arts—paintings, confections, clothes—and the tangled enchantments fairies trade for them. Foolish craftsmen might find themselves trading away decades of their life in exchange for brighter eyes, but our heroine, Isabel, a prodigy portrait painter, knows how to dodge the thickets of fey wordcraft to ask for enchantments that make her life easier: hens that always lay good eggs, firewood that shows up without needing to be chopped.
Her clientele is entirely Fair Folk, who like to see themselves immortalized by human hands, even if their beauty will outlive the canvas. Rogerson’s fey are suitably terrifying but also wonderfully ridiculous, bound by rigid rules of truth and decorum that make it impossible for them to lie or to fail to return the formal courtesy of a thanks or a bow. Isobel is able to navigate her subjects’ vanity, their restrictions, their inability to understand human constructs such as sarcasm, keeping her art in high demand and her family—the aunt who raised her after her parents’ slaying by a fairy beast, and her adopted twin sisters, who started life as goat kids until a stray fey enchantment changed them—alive.
Until Rook comes into her life. The Autumn Prince, incredibly powerful even among faeriekind, fascinates her with the impossible thing she sees in his gaze: sorrow, not quite hidden and alleged to be impossible in the emotional life of a fair one.
Isabel (not her real name, but the one she wears to keep the fey from using her true name like a yoke) is an immediately arresting heroine, talented and care-hardened and kinda wise and kinda foolish and brave enough to demand a fairy lord give her his unbreakable word that he will never touch her without her permission. Her life in Whimsy is made privileged by her craft, but Rook and his autumn-scented skin—the scent of change, death, renewal—represent the life she could have if she looked beyond her eternally summery little town. She finds that promise intoxicating, and falls in love as much with Rook is with the dream of a bigger life.
And so, in their last session together, following weeks of forging a tentative, doomed bond, she makes a vain mistake: she paints mortal emotion into his eyes, capturing the blasphemy on canvas.
This is, in fairyland, a capital offense. Rook returns to take Isabel as his prisoner, carrying her away to stand trial in the Autumn Court. But on the way they face a rising horde of terrors, including beasts, sleeping kings, and an eerie, spreading corruption, heralding a shift in the faerie world even Rook doesn’t understand. Most dangerous of all are their growing feelings for each other, which threaten to break the Good Law, a capital crime. When they take refuge in the Spring Court, where Isabel’s most faithful patron rules, she buys time by practicing her fearful new art: painting human expressions on fairy faces.
But even with the protection of both Rook and her own wiles, Isabel is constantly at threat, not least from the fearful promise of the Green Well: rarely, mortals are invited to drink from it as a mark of faerie favor, giving up their humanity—and their craft—in exchange for becoming immortal. For Isabel, it’s a fate worse than death.
Rogerson brews her story strong and heady, navigating the wilds of a dual world of enchantments while keeping her feet firmly on the path with lovely, lucid prose. An Enchantment of Ravens is a love story and a faerie story and most of all an instantly classic story that should win a place between Robin McKinley and Holly Black on your bookshelf.
An Enchantment of Ravens hits shelves September 26, and is available for pre-order now.