I want to tell you about a girl named Theodora Ettings.
When Dora was a child, a faerie stole half her soul. Not as a metaphor. Literally. And as a result, she grew up without the full range of human emotion. No crippling anxiety before a party. No rage when someone insults her. No heartbreak when life doesn't go her way. Just a pleasant, mild, slightly detached experience of the world.
Now she is being dragged through Regency London's social season, watching people perform elaborate dances of propriety and passion, genuinely puzzled by all of it.
The Man She Was Never Supposed to Meet
Then she meets Lord Elias Wilder. The Royal Sorcier. A man brilliant enough to do real magic, exhausted enough to be rude about it, and completely unprepared for a woman who will look him dead in the eye and say exactly what she thinks because she simply does not have the emotional bandwidth to pretend otherwise.
He is surrounded by people who want things from him. Dora just wants to understand the faerie magic and maybe help her cousin find a decent husband. She is the first honest thing in his orbit in years. And he has absolutely no idea what to do with that.
Why This Book Is So Quietly Devastating
What makes Half a Soul by Olivia Atwater so special is not the faerie magic, though it is genuinely unsettling and beautifully rendered. It is not even the slow-burn romance, though it is tender and very much worth the wait. It is Dora herself.
Watching a woman with half a soul navigate a world that demands she perform emotions she cannot feel is funny, yes, but it is also strangely moving. She is kind without sentimentality. Curious without anxiety. Brave in the most accidental, unbothered way imaginable. And by the time you reach the final chapters, you will realize Atwater has done something quietly extraordinary. She has written a love story about learning to feel again, told through the perspective of someone who never knew what she was missing.
The prose is witty without trying too hard. The social satire lands without being cruel. The world-building sits in the background where it belongs, never stealing the story's warmth. Fans of Georgette Heyer and Susanna Clarke would both find something to love here, which is a harder needle to thread than it sounds.
Read This Book
I finished it in a single day and immediately started the sequel.
If you have been sleeping on historical fantasy romance, this is the book that will convert you. Half a Soul is the first in Olivia Atwater's Regency Faerie Tales series and is available now wherever books are sold. Pick it up. Let Dora and Elias wreck you a little.
You will not regret it.
Have you already read it?
