The Courting of Bristol Keats launches a new adult fantasy series by Mary E. Pearson, an author known for her YA fiction. When the novel begins, Bristol Keats and her two sisters, Catalina and Harper, are scrambling to pay the utility bills in their old house and mourning the fresh loss of their father. The three sisters had grown up itinerantly with their watchful and beleaguered parents, always on the run from threats the girls were never privy to. Moving to Bowskeep was supposed to be a fresh start for the family—a chance at permanence. Unlike the overjoyed reactions of her sisters, Bristol’s response was more tempered and cautious. She went away, then a year later received news of her mother’s abrupt departure and fatal accident. Now with both parents gone, Bristol works with the local gallerist to find buyers for her father’s artwork, delivers pizzas on her bicycle, and she and Catalina take on any other odd service jobs they can get to stay afloat. 

An unexpected boon arises in the form of Jasmine, a long-lost, paternal grand-aunt expressing an interest in connecting with and gifting them a rare and valuable work of art. Bristol and Catalina both find the claims of kinship in this stranger’s letters dubious and the offer of art suspect. Their father had never spoken to them of any known biological relatives and had told them he grew up in foster care. Bristol is certain they’re being targeted in some sort of scam, however Harper urges her to at least meet with Jasmine and her advisor Eris to hear them out. 

Despite her reservations, Bristol shows up for the meeting prepared to simply leave if something feels amiss or else, turn the art over to the gallerist to determine its authenticity. Jasmine and Eris bait Bristol with a gift that is actually a veiled promise they exact from her. As it turns out, Jasmine, Eris, and their brooding companion Tyghan are all fae from the Danu nation of a magical land called Elphame, where promises are binding. They enlist Bristol’s help in locating and closing an unstable portal connecting the mortal and faerie worlds. Bristol blanches at their otherworldliness, trickery, and presumption. After initially fleeing the site, she eventually returns when an encounter with a neighbor leads her to believe that her father may not actually be dead but missing. Bristol concedes to helping the fae on her own terms. In her bargain with Tyghan, she agrees to help them close the portal in exchange for help searching for her father. Unbeknownst to Bristol, the mission she is tasked with is no easy feat and there are dire reasons behind it that gradually emerge later. While in Elphame, Bristol is faced with several startling revelations about her upbringing, true heritage, and Tyghan’s damning role in her parents’ past.

Pearson’s adult debut is full of deeply complicated character relationships that frustrate established and burgeoning loyalties by testing and stretching notions of familial, platonic, and romantic trust. There are many examples of affinity between characters, however many of those same characters are not quite what they seem. The novel employs third person narration that dips into both the male and female main characters’ minds and the occasional third person omniscient narrator takes on the perspectives of characters surrounding the central pair (including the flora and fauna of Elphame). With the regular shifts between perspectives, different characters tend to have disparate pieces of information at various points in the story. Although the clear heroine of the novel, Bristol is most often the character who is left in the dark and forced to play catch-up. Even the reader knows about the real nature of Tyghan’s complicated history with her parents long before she does. Bristol and Tyghan’s slow burn romance, which is not unlike her parents’ own star-crossed love, is on a collision course with the truth of Tyghan’s shared past with them and the secrets he carries about his present motivations. The romantic tension between the FMC and MMC, as well as the dramatic irony, set up an inevitably explosive reveal once Bristol realizes the extent to which everyone around her has lied to her.

The reading experience is akin to blending Vanessa Len’s YA fantasy romance Only a Monster, parts of Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere and Everything I Never Told You, and Georgia Summers’s The City of Stardust. As an adult fantasy romance with palace intrigue, the clash between humans and immortal/magical beings, a female protagonist with dormant powers, and an inscrutable male lead with secrets that may adversely impact the heroine, it may also be for fans of Jennifer L. Armentrout’s romantasies and Kate Golden’s Sacred Stones trilogy. 

In terms of its overarching themes and plot, it feels most like Only a Monster with the characters aged up to adults. Keats shares Only a Monster’s immersive worldbuilding, a family with nomadic ways and a hidden supernatural past, the dissonance of self-discovery, traveling between worlds and timelines, and questioning what it means to be a hero and a villain. Where Len centers a half-Chinese, half-English protagonist and her multiethnic family and touches on the social implications (the prejudices and microaggressions) that come along with navigating the world with marginalized identities in any time period, Pearson opts to not engage with race despite also featuring a mixed heroine with a multiethnic family. The FMC and her oldest sister are described as having lighter complexions than their “warm brown skinn[ed]” father and younger sister. Catalina resembles their mother with similar red hair and green eyes, while Bristol is hazel-eyed with medium brown hair. At the start of the novel, these differences in appearance are not attributed to any specific mixed heritage and there’s never any mention about how being a visibly multiethnic family is perceived by the many different people in the countless cities and towns they move to throughout the mortal world of the U.S. Around two-thirds into the book, Bristol discovers from Jasmine that her father is of mixed Indian and Irish parentage, though not much happens with this discovery. Tyghan and the majority of the other characters are cued as White.

In Only a Monster, Len introduces a novel magic system and alternate world while also drawing parallels between the protagonist Joan Chang-Hunt’s experience of being both mixed within the human world of modern London and half-human, half-monster in its otherworld past and present counterparts. It would be interesting to see if Pearson explores Bristol’s mixed Indian-Irish and human-fae heritage in greater depth while further building out the Elphame landscape in the second book of the series.

The Courting of Bristol Keats is an engrossing, escapist read well-suited for winter days.

LOGLINE: Bristol Keats, a young woman struggling to get by with her sisters in a small town after the loss of their parents, is contacted by a long-lost aunt offering to help. When Bristol meets this unknown relative, she’s thrust into a magical and dangerous other world and a fateful bargain with a faerie king who may know more about her nomadic parents’ past than he lets on.

MOOD: An engrossing, well-paced first book in a new adult fantasy series by an author known for her YA fiction. With a style that mixes fantasy, romance, and literary elements, The Courting of Bristol Keats gives readers an intricate, otherworldly story of slow burn romance, betrayal, generational secrets, and self-discovery.

TITLE: The Courting of Bristol Keats

AUTHOR: Mary E. Pearson

GENRE: Fantasy, Romance, Mythology, Faeries, Fiction 

PUB DATE: 12 November 2024

PUBLISHER: Flatiron Books, an imprint of Macmillan

LENGTH: 560 pages