'A malign enchantress might be exactly what she needs': the Shakespeare-obsessed romance I couldn't put down
I'm already counting down to the sequel
I’ve just finished Mortal Follies, and I’m already itching to start its sequel.
Alexis Hall’s 2023 novel is billed as “Queer Fantasy Bridgerton,” and the pitch absolutely undersells it.
Set in Bath in 1814, the story follows Miss Maelys Mitchelmore, a young lady whose entrance into high society is derailed when her ball gown begins unravelling itself in front of the entire room.
The curse only escalates from there – wasps, ruined dinners, a very inconvenient case of near-drowning – and Maelys has nowhere to turn but Lady Georgiana Landrake, a brooding young noblewoman nicknamed “the Duke of Annadale,” rumoured to have murdered her own father and brothers for their fortune.
Georgiana might be exactly the malign enchantress Maelys needs. She’s also, inconveniently, someone Maelys can’t stop thinking about.
What makes the book sing, though, is the narrator: Robin Goodfellow, better known to English students everywhere as Puck.
Hall’s Puck has fallen out of Oberon’s favour and now scrapes a living as a professional storyteller, and he’s still nursing a grudge over A Midsummer Night’s Dream — namely, that Shakespeare wrote him into the play and never once credited him for the material.
He interrupts the narrative constantly to gripe about “the Stratford man’s” liberties with the truth, drops asides about the real fairy court behind Titania and Oberon, and treats the entire Regency setting as one more stage he’s begrudgingly allowed to narrate from.
It’s a genuinely clever conceit: a novel that takes Shakespeare’s fairies as historical fact, then hands the story to the one character with every reason to be bitter about how the Bard told it.
Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review, calling it “full of adventure, chaos, magic, and lust,” and Kirkus landed on “part historical, part fantasy, all top-notch queer romance”. Both of which track.
READ MORE: My favourite Alexis Hall book is finally an audiobook, and it was worth the wait
The sequel, Confounding Oaths, swaps Maelys and Georgiana for a new pairing — Mr John Caesar, trying to steer his sister through Bath’s marriage mart, and Captain Orestes James, an officer fresh from Wellington’s armies, while staying inside the same fairy-haunted 1815. I cannot wait to read.
It stands alone, so no need to have read book one first, but after finishing Mortal Follies in a couple of sittings, I’m not waiting around.
Mortal Follies is available now in paperback, ebook and audiobook. Confounding Oaths is out now too.