My heartfelt thanks to Electric Monkey Books for gifting me an ARC of “The Wicked Lies of Habren Faire” through NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. It felt less like receiving a book and more like being handed a key to a secret, rain-dampened gate that opened onto a world of shadowed forests, silver-threaded skies, and stories that will linger in my heart long after the last page.
UNWAITH AR Y TRO (ONCE UPON A TIME)
Some stories do not simply invite you in; they call to you, like the distant echo of a harp over the misted hills, the way the wind whispers through gorse and heather. “The Wicked Lies of Habren Faire” is one such tale. It is a dark, glittering, and deeply Welsh romantasy that slips under your skin like the shadow of a half-forgotten lullaby, blending the perilous beauty of Pan’s Labyrinth, the whimsy and world of Jim Henson’s Labyrinth and the Dark Crystal, the yearning of Bridge to Terabithia, and the wonder of The Spiderwick Chronicles and the decadence of Peter Pan but shot through with the heart, hiraeth, and mythos of Cymru.
From the first page, “The Wicked Lies of Habren Faire” had me utterly spellbound, Anna Fiteni’s words weaving an eerie, otherworldly atmosphere that seemed to curl like mist around my shoulders. Every line shimmered with magic, but it was never a safe magic; it was the kind that glints with danger just beneath the surface, daring you to step closer. As I read, I felt that familiar pull in my chest, hiraeth, a yearning for loved ones long gone, and the worlds hidden in our hills and streams. This book is steeped in that same soul-deep Welsh folklore, populated by whimsical, wild, and sometimes frightening beings born from the old beliefs of my people, like Mari Lwyd, the Cyhyraeth, Ceffyl Dŵr, and Pwca. And yet, amidst the peril, there is beauty, warmth, and a fierce heartbeat, a reminder that even the darkest tales can hold the light.
Set in a small 1800s mining village, Fiteni’s debut is steeped in the grit and poetry of Wales: the coal dust that clings to your skin, the chapel bells, the stubborn survival of a people whose land and language (iaith y nefoedd, “the language of heaven”) have been stolen and suppressed, yet endure. Sabrina Parry, our prickly and imperfect heroine, has learned to survive with sharp words and sharper wits. Her sister Ceridwen, gentle, romantic, with a heart too soft for the world, vanishes into the gwyll (twilight) of the nearby woods, leaving behind an iron ring. To save her, Sabrina must cross into Eu Gwald, the perilous realm of the Tylwyth Teg. And here, Fiteni gives us a fairytale as it should be: beautiful and rotting, intoxicating and dangerous. This is not the softened, modern Fae; these are the tricksters of old tales, the kind my Tad-cu used to whisper about at bedtime. The ones you’d leave milk out for… and pray never to meet. In Habren Faire, the moonlight hides teeth, and bargains are binding in ways no mortal can quite escape.
I cried tears, real, unashamed tears, because this world and these characters have a chokehold on me, the kind that leaves you thinking about them long after you’ve closed the book. Sabrina Parry has steamrolled her way into my heart with all the grace of a storm battering the coast. She is everything you’d expect a fantasy heroine not to be, and yet somehow, so much more: spiteful, unflinchingly honest in her lies, a troublemaker who cheats, irritates, and gleefully upends lives when it suits her. She looks the neat little path destiny has drawn for her square in the eye, and probably punches whoever dared to suggest she follow it in the first place. And still, she is fiercely loving, deeply loyal, the kind of person who will knock you out or cut off your finger if it means protecting the people she cares for. Fiteni writes her with the same rough-edged, beating heart as the March sisters from Little Women, and her family — her Da, her sister Ceridwen, her Gran- feel as though they’ve stepped straight out of a literary classic and into this wild fae world. There’s a touch of Alice in Wonderland’s madness here too, all swirled with a Tim Burton-esque shadow, making it both unsettling and utterly irresistible.
Neirin oh, Neirin, the annoyingly magnetic fae prince who barges into Sabrina’s quest and into my thoughts far more than I care to admit. He is cut from the same stardust-and-sin cloth as David Bowie’s Jareth, all vanity and silver-tongued charm, at once dazzlingly clever and utterly foolish. His name feels almost too noble for someone so deliciously self-absorbed, so preening, so obsessed with humanity, and yet dangerously unpredictable. There’s something slick in the way his brown eyes catch the light, his lashes casting shadows like spider legs across his cheek. His wavy black hair is streaked with silver, gleaming as if someone dipped a brush in moonlight, and he wears black velvet embroidered with constellations, stars, moons, and planets stitched in silver thread, like he’s wearing the night sky itself. Fiteni infuses him with an edginess that reminds me of Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream; indeed, the whole Ellyllon court has that Shakespearean blend of mischief, beauty, and lurking peril. Neirin is both a lovable rogue and playful trickster, and the slow-burn tension between him and Sabrina is a quiet thread woven into the greater tapestry, all the more intoxicating for its restraint. With betrayals twisting in the dark and their banter crackling from irritation to something far more dangerous, I found my heart racing every time they shared the page.
The LGBTQ+ representation in The Wicked Lies of Habren Faire is woven as seamlessly into the fabric of the story as the silver threads in Neirin’s velvet coat, natural, unforced, and all the more beautiful for it. Fiteni doesn’t treat queerness as a spectacle or side note; it simply exists here, alive and unashamed, as it should in any world worth escaping to. Among the Tylwyth Teg and all their tricksy kind, selkies are slipping between sea and shore, and mermaids, morgens, whose songs curl through the waves with love and longing for more than one kind of heart. In a tale so deeply rooted in Welsh folklore and history, it felt like a quiet, defiant act of reclamation, a reminder that our stories, like our people, have always been more varied, more complex, and more wondrous than the narrow paths history tried to confine them to.
Thematically, Fiteni captures something I rarely see done so deftly in fantasy: the bittersweet ache of growing up, of leaving home, of returning to find it altered, and knowing you have been altered too. She threads in grief with quiet grace: grief for the dead, for the selves we leave behind, but also for the loss of stories and traditions under the weight of colonisation. As a Welsh reader, I felt my heart clench at the way she honours the mining communities, their sacrifices, their stolen labour, their resilience and at the way she refuses to sand the edges off Welsh identity.
“The Wicked Lies of Habren Faire” feels, to me, like a love letter to Wales, a celebration of everything that makes my homeland what it is. Too often, romantasy novels borrow from Welsh myth and landscape without ever acknowledging, let alone interrogating, the roots of their inspiration. But Fiteni does not just nod to Wales; she treasures it, honours it, and breathes life into its heart. Giving us, the reader, the relentless rain that slicks the slate roofs, the forests that seem to go on forever until they spill into the mist, and the ancient stone castles that rise from the hills like something out of a dream. This is a Wales that is both real and mythical, where the grit of the coal seams lies alongside the shimmer of faerie light, and where every page feels steeped in that aching, longing for home.
There is hiraeth in these pages that deep, untranslatable longing for a place, a time, a feeling that can never be fully recaptured. And yet, there is hope too. Hope in the fierce, messy love between sisters. Hope in the idea that even bargains with the Fae might be survived, if not won. Hope in the survival of the story itself. Fiteni’s prose is lush without being overwrought, laced with the cadence of a fireside folktale. She balances whimsy with peril, tenderness with sharp teeth. The ending is as it must be bittersweet, leaving you breathless, a little bruised, and aching to walk again among the shadowed groves of Eu Gwald.
There are books that you finish and remember for their plot, and then there are books that leave you with words that root themselves deep in your bones. “The Wicked Lies of Habren Faire” gifted me more than one such line, the kind you carry like talismans. “Even when you’re as old as me, if you’re not happy, then you’re not at the end,” is a quiet, defiant reminder that life is not a straight path to some fixed point, and that joy, no matter your age, is worth chasing until your last breath. “People love us for our efforts”, spoke to the marrow of my being; that we are valued not solely for success, but for the trying, the striving, the reaching beyond our limits. Fiteni’s reflection that “our lives are small… a speck of dust on an old coat or a mayfly at the start of its first and only day, but from them spring a thousand stories” is both humbling and electrifying, a reminder that even the smallest existence can be a universe to someone. The notion that “we’re all being used by a big house somewhere” is a bitter truth dressed in whimsy, hinting at the invisible powers, be they political, economic, or fae, that shape our lives without consent. And beneath it all is the warning: “All the best lies sprout from a seed of truth.” It is a lesson in discernment, in knowing that what feels real may only be the bait, and that when you have less, the things you hold, love, trust, and belong matter infinitely more. These quotes did not just shape my reading experience; they shaped me.
For me, “The Wicked Lies of Habren Faire” was like finding the path to the worlds I used to dream of as a child, listening to my grandad speak of the Tylwyth Teg worlds I thought I’d outgrown, but which were only sleeping. This book woke them, giving me back my sight and for that, I am grateful.
“The Wicked Lies of Habren Faire” will step into the mortal world on August 28th, 2025, and I wholeheartedly recommend letting it sweep you away the moment it does. This is a tale spun of rain and starlight, of hiraeth and heartbreak, of cruel fae bargains and the kind of love, fierce, messy, unyielding, that can outwit even the oldest magic. It is a story to lose yourself in and to carry with you, like a secret charm tucked in your pocket, long after you’ve left the woods behind.
A spellbinding debut — dark as slate, bright as starlight, and full of hiraeth.
