The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill

Read Time: 3 Minutes

I had a difficult time pressing pause on The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill by Rowenna Miller. The lives and struggles of the characters grew on me, slowly at first like the cider apples, cherries, and pears in their family-run orchard in the quite, small town of Moore’s Ferry, Indiana, in early 1900s USA. Set just before the women’s suffrage movement, it’s a slice-of-life fantasy wrapped in rich folklore, social tension, and the quiet determination of two sisters trying to shape their own futures.

Alaine and Delphine, daughters of multi-generational family of fruit growers, know well the rules of fairy bargains as they have been passed down through the family. Leave a trinket like a bit of glass, a ribbon, or a pin and ask politely with a small rhyme. Maybe your lost item turns up. Maybe your harvest goes well. Maybe, if you’re bold, you ask for more. The magic isn’t flashy, but it’s stitched seamlessly into the characters’ everyday lives, and the way it builds gradually into something much larger is part of the charm. It starts small, domestic and ends up deep in the world of the fae, where the stakes are far greater than the price of a silver pin.

Alaine runs the orchard with her husband Jack, while Delphine always had her sights on more, wanting to get out and be someone of importance in the city. A marriage to Pierce Grafton, an up-and-coming dealmaker who own the largest glass factory in the state seems ideal. Of course, be careful what you wish for.

I think that the pacing of the story won’t be for everyone. It’s not slow so much as it is unrushed, matching the agricultural rhythm of the characters’ lives. That worked for me. It made the more magical elements feel like a natural extension of their world rather than a genre switch. As Alaine gets bolder with her bargains, the story shifts gears in a way that feels earned.

Delphine, once married into wealth, finds herself caught between her working-class roots and the snobbery of upper-crust society. It causes a lot of problems for Delphine, not just between her and her husband but between who she’s expected to be and who she actually is. How she was frequently silenced, not just by her husband, but by the other women in that society who’d internalised those rules and continued the cycle of abuse.

The fae themselves are the clever and whimsical tricksters you’d expect. Making bargains and holding you to the letter of the deal, regardless of if you understood it completely or if it was wordplay to make you think it was something else. No spoilers, but I did enjoy the depth at which we got to delve into their world and better understood their logic and motives.

Jesse Vilinsky’s narration hits the right notes. She brings warmth and subtlety to the sisters’ voices, and she has just the right tone for those intimate, emotional moments. The production overall was smooth, no errors of note, so nothing pulled me out of the experience.

Each chapter begins with a little piece of fairy folklore or fae wisdom, which added a whimsical touch to this cozy historical fantasy. It does tackles serious issues such as domestic abuse and women’s rights, providing depth to the characters’ struggles and decisions, while at the same time one of magic, sisterhood, class conflict, and fae politics. I fully enjoyed this and feel a pang of regret of not being able to visit there myself. So if this sounds like your kind of thing, give it a go! Just don’t forget to leave something shiny on your windowsill… you never know who’s listening.

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