The Summer War by Naomi Novik
Format: eARC
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fairy tales, fantasy, retellings
Pages: 144
Published by Del Rey on September 16, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

In this poignant, heartfelt novella from the New York Times bestselling author of Spinning Silver and the Scholomance Trilogy, a young witch who has inadvertently cursed her brother to live a life without love must find a way to undo her spell.
Celia discovered her talent for magic on the day her beloved oldest brother Argent left home. Furious at him for abandoning her in a war-torn land, she lashed out, not realizing her childish, angry words would suddenly become imbued with the power of prophecy, dooming him to a life without love.
While Argent wanders the world, forced to seek only fame and glory instead of the love and belonging he truly desires, Celia attempts to undo the curse she placed on him. Yet even as she grows from a girl to a woman, she cannot find the solution—until she learns the truth about the centuries-old war between her own people and the summerlings, the immortal beings who hold a relentless grudge against their mortal neighbors.
Now, with the aid of her unwanted middle brother, Celia may be able to both undo her eldest brother's curse and heal the lands so long torn apart by the Summer War.

My Review:

“Back in the days when wishes still held power,” there was a human kingdom bordering the lands belonging to the Fae. In other words, this is a fairy tale. But not nearly as much like the fairy tales we all grew up on.

Because this isn’t a story to entertain children, it’s a story about one particular child, twelve-year-old Lady Celia, and her rather abrupt coming of age.

Celia comes of age, and comes into her power, at the ripe ‘old’ age of twelve, when her dearly beloved oldest brother, Argent, casts aside his inheritance and his family in one very fell swoop because he can no longer live under his father’s dominion.

Because Argent is gay and their father isn’t having THAT sort of behavior in his successor. Or that’s how it appears to Argent. To Celia, it appears that all of her beloved brother’s protestations that he’d always love her and always take care of her were bald-faced lies.

The only reason that she knew he was leaving was because she waited up for him and confronted him about it. He KNOWS he can’t stay, because he has witnessed first-hand how his father punishes men just like him – and he can’t live that lie.

But Celia is too young, perhaps, for that explanation. All she sees and feels is heartbreak, grief, and the loss of the person she held most dear in the whole world. And her wishes do have power.

Magical power.

In that spasm of grief and angst and betrayal, Celia curses her beloved brother to never be able to love or be loved by anyone ever again. It’s the kind of thing children say when they’re thwarted, and Celia is still a child.

But technically, she has just come into her womanhood, and magic is all about the fine print and the technicalities. She has power, and she has just used it to wound someone she dearly loves.

She spends the next three years trying to find Argent and take back the curse, but to no avail. Only for an entirely different betrayal to bring them face-to-face once more, on the eve of what could be both of their deaths.

And the kingdom along with them. Or, perhaps, two.

Escape Rating A-: The Summer War is a bit of a fractured fairy tale, much like two of the author’s previous books, Uprooted and Spinning Silver. Also, like both of those stories, the fairy tale – or more likely an amalgam of fairy tales and fairy tale tropes – any single origin story isn’t all that obvious – and may not exist at all.

Which honestly doesn’t matter, because this is one of those stories where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts – which is especially true because its story and its lessons are packed into the length of a novella.

And it’s perfect at that length, because there are details in the story that don’t bear close examination, although the thing as a whole is beautiful in the tale it tells AND its compactness.

What makes this so much fun to read is that, while it very much reads like a fairy tale – it’s exactly the kind of fairy tale we didn’t read as children. Instead, very much like T. Kingfisher’s imagined and reimagined fairy tale-type stories, Hemlock & Silver, Nettle & Bone and especially in this case Thornhedge, The Summer War is a story where the ‘princess’ (she isn’t technically, and that does matter in the end), not only isn’t waiting around to be rescued but has brains and real agency. Celia is the prime mover and shaker of the story even as she herself is moved and shook.

While the story here reminds me of Thornhedge, Celia as a character reminds me a lot of Snow in Hemlock & Silver. Both girls are twelve, and their actions are petulant and angry and hurt but then they are ONLY TWELVE and it’s a sheltered twelve at that. The difference – and it’s important to the story – is that the time period covered by Hemlock is short so that Snow is still twelve at the end and in over her head the whole time. Although she finally does use her head in the end.

In this story, Celia starts turning into Anja the healer pretty damn fast. Not exactly, but she starts maturing at perhaps a more rapid pace than seems likely. OTOH, her circumstances push her hard. She grows up fast because there is suddenly no adult to adult for her and she has no choice but to take up the reins herself. So she does.

With the help of her formerly disregarded and disparaged middle brother Roric. And it’s the making of both of them in more ways than one. The sibling relationships in this story are lovely, even when they hurt.

But the beating and broken heart of this story is all in the title. It’s right there. It’s about the war between the fae, the people of the Summerlands, and the humans. And even though the reasons for the war, the reasons the fae attack the humans and their methods of doing so, are all seemingly covered in the glamor of faerie, the story is about forcing both kingdoms to recognize their real motivations and the true cost of war. Because NEITHER king is willing to look into their own motivations. At least not until Celia screws THEIR supposed courage – along with her own father’s – to HER sticking point.

The fae king values his theoretical honor and his bloody vengeance over the welfare of his kingdom. And the human king lies, cheats, steals and betrays his own people just to keep his political rivals focused on the fae so that he can keep his throne. It’s Celia, trapped in a tower and the pawn of both kingdoms, who still manages to pull aside the glamor they are both using to cover their own actions and misdeeds – and shows the rot underneath the so-called glory to the people of both courts.

So it’s Celia, with her “wish that had power,” who brings all the forces together, the fae king, her own father, her brothers, the fae court and the people on both sides who have been sacrificed for their kings’ pride, and into a focus as sharp as any sword, so that The Summer War, the war that never truly ended, can finally, peacefully and above all TRULY, come to an end.

(The phrase “Back in the days when wishes still held power,” is from Alison Saft’s A Dark and Drowning Tide, which is a marvelous and thought-provoking fantasy but not a readalike for The Summer War. But the quote fits SO well I couldn’t resist.)

If you love fractured fairy tales, or stories in that style, especially those where agency resides in the most needed and merely the most usual people and places, or if you loved this author’s fairy tale stories Uprooted and Spinning Silver, or T. Kingfisher’s, or Amal El-Mohtar’s The River Has Roots, you’re going to love The Summer War.