The Summer War

Naomi Novik
Completed 6/17/2026, Reviewed 6/17/2026
4 stars

This novella felt overly long, despite being under 150 pages.  It’s about interactions with faeries: their vengeance, their oaths, and complicated stratagems to bring peace between the two worlds.  This felt like a common fae trope: faeries take a human and the human escapes by convoluting the fae logic.  Novik made it more complex than that, in a good way, but the prose felt bloated and there was too much exposition to catch the reader up on the history of the situation.  This 2026 Hugo nominee for Novella is probably my least favorite of the list.  While I felt like it was a great turn on the trope, all the filler and background kept me from feeling like this book was up there with my other favorite nominees.

Celia is a young girl, a daughter of a powerful nobleman, just about to reach her sexual maturity and come into her burgeoning sorcery gifts.  Their kingdom lies on the border with the fae world, called The Summer Lands.  She was very close to her oldest brother Argent, a highly decorated knight and hero.  When he tells his father he is disowning the family and going to live with the fae, young Celia panics.  She knows he keeps being gay a secret and that that is the reason for him leaving.  She inadvertently curses him by wishing he never find love again.  As time goes on, she regrets the curse more and more and is determined to go after him to break the curse.  However, the prince of their kingdom delivers the message that she fulfills the prophecy of the treaty at the end of the Summer Wars and must marry the prince.  However, the prince is in cahoots with the fae and it looks like another war may break out.  And Celia is at the center of this mess.

In general, the characterization was very good.  However, I did not really like Celia and couldn’t empathize with her.  Yeah, the twists and switcheroos of the fae was wonderfully complex, but I couldn’t empathize with any of her feelings through it all.  On the other hand, I liked Argent and her other brother Roric.  Argent stood his ground when it came to being true to himself.  Roric, the forgotten brother, was kind and forgiving despite being treated like he was invisible his whole life.  But the story centered on Celia, and that made it feel very long.  

The world building was great, though.  Novik did a great job of describing the differences between time in the Summer Lands versus human time.  And even though she used summerfolk instead of faeries, she stuck to much of the general faerie mythology while making it feel like her own.  

The biggest reason for taking off a star is the prosy exposition.  I didn’t like how the history of the war and the truce was replayed to bring us up to speed.  It was too chock full of complexity.  And it felt more like it was telling me about it instead of showing me.  It took me until finishing the book that I figured out the difference between the princes, even though their names were very different.  It was part of the fae’s game, but I didn’t like it.  And without empathy for the main character, it was hard to wade through it all to see what happened to her next.  I came close to giving this book three stars, but I settled on four out of five because of the brothers and the exciting twist upon twist of an ending.