The Power Politics of Fairyland

Sarah J. Sover, Faed to Black (Fractured Fae Book Two)

Gwendolyn Evenshine is settling uncomfortably into her role as the fairy kingdom’s first and only licensed private investigator. But a mysterious stranger appears in her office with the magical world’s equivalent of chloroform, and Gwen wakes up trapped inside a box. A little tense log-rolling reveals that Gwen’s been kidnapped by her own family. Because Gwen’s secretly no mere PI; she’s a runaway member of fairyland’s ancient aristocracy.

It’s hard to imagine a second series novel which departs more abruptly from the first. Sarah J. Sover’s first Fractured Fae novel followed the time-honored pattern set by Jim Butcher or Laurel K. Hamilton, a crime novel set against a background of creatures from myth and folktale. But just as protagonists Harry Dresden and Anita Blake have secret birthrights, so does Gwen Evenshine. Sover just skips the several-book buildup.

Exactly who kidnapped Gwen, the mystery that dominates the first few (very short) chapters, gets resolved quickly. The more important question becomes why. Gwen abandoned her aristocratic birthright years ago, and resents getting dragged back. Meanwhile her friend and business partner Chessa, having determined who nabbed Gwen, taps some old allies to mount a rescue mission. She apparently thinks it’ll be easy to spring a prisoner from Avalon.

Yes, that Avalon. Gwen and Chessa’s fairy lineage descends from the enigmatic kingdom that brought King Arthur and Morgan le Fay to power. The first novel occurred in the fairyland corresponding with Boston, and the Revolutionary heritage that city contains, but this second goes back even farther, to the English-speaking world’s pre-Christian heritage. Fae can survive for centuries of nothing kills them, so their grudges can last equally long, apparently.

Sarah J. Sover

Sover’s prior novel was a conventional PI story, like Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler wrote. A protagonist with internal scars chases a deeply personal definition of justice, although “justice” doesn’t necessarily correspond with “law.” This novel swerves into Ian Fleming or John le Carré territory. It continues the notion that justice and right are ad hoc creations without conventional morality. But rather than crime, it focuses on politics and world affairs.

Or anyway, the first half does. Sover initially focuses on the enemies of free society, and the lies and backroom deals that society conducts to preserve freedom. How free are we, she asks, if our leaders must engage in skullduggery to conserve that freedom? Then, somewhere around the halfway mark, Sover swerves again. She abandons the pretense of James Bond-ish subterfuge, and pushes her characters into a full-on insurgency.

The parallels with current affairs are inescapable. In the war between the Seelie and Unseelie Courts of fairy, Sover presents the Unseelie as amoral, reveling in cruelty and sacrificing innocent civilians to their power schemes. Yet the Seelie, supposedly just and liberated, are obsessed with forms of order, unaware that the world has changed without them. The Unseelie are evil, but successful; the Seelie are benevolent, but aloof.

On some level, mass-market fiction is always about its audience. Sover shows how the twin idols of power or morality blind authorities to the common suffering outside their doors. Gwen and Chessa serve the Seelie Court, each in their own way, and therefore the forms of order, and they’re shocked by the Unseelie’s casual cruelty. Yet the streets of Avalon teem with fae whose lives are neither cruel nor orderly.

Gwen abandoned the Seelie Court, with their hoity-toity ways and cold politesse, years earlier. Her one regret was that her abandonment forced her to leave her brother, a bright-eyed and optimistic kid. The intervening years have seen Gwen become independent, but poor and plagued with second thoughts. When politics reunites her with her baby brother, she sees that Liam’s gone the opposite direction, becoming a creature of order and bureaucracy.

Any readers who fail to anticipate that Gwen’s reunion with Liam will ultimately result in disappointment, are probably new to paperback fantasy. The only question is what form that disappointment will take. As the stakes continue to increase, and Gwen must relearn the methods of power politics she once rejected, she finds herself willing to countenance many kinds of disappointment.

If anything, this second novel in Sover’s Fractured Fae novel is better than the first. In the prior volume, Sover experimented playfully with the conventions of the urban fantasy genre. Here, Sover throws the conventions into a blender and spreads them around ecstatically, more in love with her characters and story than her marketing niche. The result is fast-paced, breathtaking, and feels much, much shorter than it actually is.