A Star Shall Fall

Kevin got me this book for Christmas because there was a dragon on the cover and the blurb mentioned fairies. It turns out that this is a pretty good metric for determining whether I'll like a book or not. It helped that it also combined elements of historical fiction, making for a pretty cool book overall.

Marie Brennan's A Star Shall Fall is actually the third book in a series about the fairies who live under London. I was a little wary about jumping into the series midway, but I ultimately don't think I missed too much. This book does a pretty good job of recapping the important information from the previous books, and it stands on it's own very well.

The previous books apparently dealt with a war between the fairies and a dragon, which resulted in the Great Fire of London in 1666. The fairies managed to disable and trap the dragon. However, they weren't able to build a strong enough cage to hold it forever. So when Halley's Comet came by in 1682, they sent the dragon up to it and washed their hands of the situation.

A Star Shall Fall opens with Halley's discovery that comets travel in periodic orbits, and that his comet would be returning in 1758 or 1759. This prompts the fairies to begin working together with the Royal Society of London to figure out a way to destroy the dragon once and for all, or at least keep it bound on the comet for another 75 years.

The combination of science and magic was my favorite part of the book. And I loved getting cameos from the likes of Isaac Newton and Henry Cavendish. It was a lot of fun to see how everything wove together with the fairy court. I'd definitely recommend this book (and maybe the whole series) if you like history mixed in with your fantasy.

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