Mortal Follies Review: When the Storyteller Gets Between the Lovers

Full spoilers ahead: This review discusses the two curse plots and the lovers’ final rescue and reunion. Mortal Follies is adult sapphic historical fantasy romance, set in an alternate Bath in 1814, with on-page sexual content. Relevant content includes threatened death, animal sacrifice, family deaths, misogyny, class inequality and homophobia. The setting is invented historical fantasy, not a reliable account of Regency social life.

Alexis Hall’s novel gives romantic storytelling an unusually troublesome chaperone. A fairy narrator, strongly identified with Shakespeare’s Puck, follows Maelys Mitchelmore and Lady Georgiana Landrake while repeatedly insisting on the importance of the story he chooses to tell. He is entertaining partly because he does not regard mortal distress with the seriousness mortals expect. The difficulty is that the reader must become invested in a love story through a voice that enjoys standing between the lovers and their audience.

The book’s central tension is therefore larger than its curses. It asks whether a story can lovingly mock romantic conventions while still allowing the people inside them to feel vulnerable. Its most appealing possibility is that satire can clear away social rules that have made desire difficult to recognize. Its limitation is that a narrator’s cleverness can become another obstacle to recognizing what these women mean to each other.

This is original analysis based on the authorized opening excerpt, publisher information and several independent critical accounts, rather than complete firsthand reading. Del Rey’s publication page and the UK publisher both date the original release to June 6, 2023. The publisher’s library page records its Kirkus best-book recognition, providing specific linked reception evidence without inventing a commercial ranking.

A dress becomes a social emergency

The authorized excerpt begins with Maelys’s clothing disintegrating during a ball. The immediate danger is exposure, but the larger threat is the meaning other people will assign to it. A material failure can become a moral judgment because society has trained itself to interpret a woman’s appearance as evidence of her character.

Magic makes that mechanism literal. The dress is not merely uncomfortable or badly made; someone or something is actively undoing the condition of her respectable presence. The incident reveals how fragile respectability can be when it depends on surfaces a person cannot fully control.

Georgiana’s arrival changes the available response. A woman already regarded with suspicion has less incentive to treat propriety as sacred. Her ability to help is connected to the very reputation that makes respectable people hesitate around her. The socially undesirable person becomes practically useful when the approved world offers no solution.

This is a sharp foundation for attraction. Maelys encounters a person whose freedom is unsettling but immediately valuable. What first appears to be rescue can also become an introduction to a different set of possibilities. Desire begins alongside the discovery that the existing social script is not the only one available.

The Duke is a nickname, not a transformation into a man

Lady Georgiana is called the Duke of Annadale, but the excerpt distinguishes the teasing name from the actual title. Her father and brothers are dead; she has inherited property and money while society supplies rumors about how it happened. Calling her simply a duke would erase the book’s joke and misdescribe its heroine.

The name also transfers a familiar romance image to a woman. Wealth, reserve, danger and an unhappy family history belong to the brooding aristocratic love interest. Hall makes those conventions available to a sapphic pairing without pretending that the transfer leaves every social question unchanged.

A heroine’s intimidating reputation can be liberating, but it can also conceal a person behind another type. Georgiana risks becoming desirable chiefly because she resembles a recognizable fantasy of power. The romance needs to give that fantasy an individual motive and cost.

Maelys’s task is therefore not just to discover whether the rumors are true. She must learn how Georgiana uses them and what they prevent other people from seeing. The same distance that protects a person from scrutiny can make intimacy harder to sustain.

Desire is an awakening, not a complete explanation

Maelys’s attraction gives her a way to understand why the marriage prospects offered by society have not stirred her. That recognition matters without making Georgiana the only imaginable object of desire. A first compelling possibility can reveal a broader truth about what someone wants.

The distinction helps avoid a common weakness in awakening romances: the heroine seems to fall in love because a person of the desired gender is finally available, rather than because this particular person becomes significant. Recognition of sexuality and development of attachment can overlap, but they should not become interchangeable.

Georgiana’s experience and Maelys’s relative inexperience introduce another imbalance. The story gains tension from one woman knowing more about desire, but expertise should not become unquestioned authority over the other’s choices. Caution can be kind; condescension can sound similar while doing different work.

The Smut Report finds the relationship’s approach-and-retreat pattern uneven. That criticism points to the need for changes within repetition. A refusal may deepen characterization if it reveals a new fear or boundary. Repeating the same refusal without further understanding can make the courtship feel stationary.

A narrator who turns suffering into entertainment

Puck’s narration is not neutral decoration. The excerpt establishes a collector of stories who finds human misadventure amusing and is willing to interfere. That perspective makes him an active participant in the reader’s experience, even when he is not the central subject of events.

His distance can produce satire. Social rules that feel absolute to the people obeying them become absurd when viewed by a being with different priorities. A ball’s etiquette, a scandal’s importance and an aristocrat’s prestige lose some of their apparent inevitability.

But the distance also has an emotional price. The reader may be invited to enjoy a predicament before being allowed to understand its cost. If the narrator keeps pointing out how entertaining the scene is, he can prevent the lovers’ distress from acquiring its own gravity.

Courtney Reads Romance credits the satirical voice while finding it creates distance from the central women. Kirkus responds much more enthusiastically to the same narrator. This difference is useful reader-fit evidence. The voice is a structural commitment, not a brief opening flourish.

The most convincing version of this technique would let Puck occasionally discover a limit to his own interpretation. A moment he cannot dismiss or fully explain could make the lovers’ feelings exceed the story collector’s categories. Their significance would then be demonstrated by his inadequacy, rather than merely asserted despite it.

Why two plots can feel like two books

The initial curse is resolved around the middle of the novel, after which courtship and further magical danger alter the emphasis. Required Reading identifies that structural shift and relates the separations to the rhythm of Regency romance. Chonky Books finds the division less satisfying and would have preferred the material separated.

Resolving an apparent main problem early can be productive. It forces a story to ask what remains once the external excuse for proximity disappears. If the women no longer need to collaborate against the same threat, will they still choose each other?

That is an excellent romantic question. The difficulty comes when the next phase feels disconnected from the development that preceded it. A new danger should reveal consequences of earlier decisions, not simply restore urgency after the initial engine has stopped.

More connective scenes would help. The women could negotiate what their association means in ordinary circumstances, disagree about an expectation or attempt a shared activity without immediate peril. Such material would make the renewed danger test an emerging relationship rather than supply one.

The pacing problem is therefore not solved merely by removing digressions. The story may need more quiet relational progression even while some narration could be shortened. Length and emotional duration are different matters.

A rescue should change the relationship’s terms

The closing rescue reverses the initial distribution of power. Georgiana sacrifices herself to protect Maelys, and Maelys pursues a bargain and tasks that return Georgiana alive. The detailed sequence is reported in krilves’s spoiler review at The StoryGraph; the broader mutual-rescue structure is also reflected in the critical accounts linked below. No unverified account of each task is supplied here.

The reversal has a persuasive purpose. Maelys is no longer only the inexperienced woman who needs the intimidating rescuer. She acts on behalf of someone whose power has not made her invulnerable. The romance becomes reciprocal through action.

However, reciprocal rescue is not automatically reciprocal communication. A person can cross extraordinary obstacles for a lover and still be uncertain how they will live together. The ending’s success depends partly on whether saving each other also changes the habits of withholding and unilateral protection.

The StoryGraph reviewer questions that final relational resolution. This is a specific reader’s assessment, not an established consensus. It nevertheless identifies the right distinction: the removal of a curse settles a magical problem, while the women’s manner of relating remains an emotional question.

The ending offers survival and romantic reunion rather than a tragic permanent separation. Its fairy-tale hope is meaningful, but a fuller glimpse of ordinary mutual trust would strengthen the happily-ever-after. The story has shown what love will risk. It could show more of what love will practice.

The pleasure and limit of irreverence

Hall’s alternate Regency permits a combination of manners and caprice. Ancient deities remain active, social prestige remains powerful, and neither necessarily behaves fairly. The resulting comedy exposes a world in which explanations are abundant but security is scarce.

That makes the women’s attachment an appealing counterweight. Choosing someone can become a modest form of constancy within a universe governed by gossip and unpredictable powers. The romance does not need to defeat every unfair system to offer a consequential commitment.

Yet irreverence should not make all consequences weightless. Animal sacrifice, threatened death and social exclusion are more than amusing eccentricities. The shifts in tone need room to register those costs. A narrator may be flippant while the book remains attentive; readers need evidence of that difference.

The novel’s strongest potential lies in allowing tenderness to interrupt mockery. A moment of straightforward care can become especially moving inside a voice that usually prefers elaborate evasions. That requires trusting the emotional scene enough to let it proceed.

Reader fit

Mortal Follies is best approached as a sapphic Regency fantasy romance with a conspicuous comic storyteller. Readers interested in pagan deities, fairy bargains, social satire and a deliberately mediated narrative may find that combination delightful. Readers who want sustained direct access to both lovers’ interior lives may find it less intimate than its premise suggests.

The sexual material is on-page, though critical sources describe the explicitness as comparatively moderate. Its magical dangers and animal sacrifice also make a blanket “cozy” label unhelpful. The book’s wit does not remove the need for accurate content expectations.

Its achievement is opening a familiar aristocratic romance script to women whose desire that script does not comfortably accommodate. Its limitation is that the teller sometimes becomes more vivid than the attachment being told. The final rescue makes a strong claim for mutual devotion. The romance would be richer still if the narrator gave that devotion more uninterrupted room.

Sources and editorial basis

Original publication details were checked through Del Rey and Hachette UK. Author information, authorized excerpt material and Kirkus best-book recognition are available through Penguin Random House Library Marketing.

The critical basis includes Kirkus, The Smut Report, Courtney Reads Romance, Required Reading, Chonky Books, Reviews That Burn and krilves’s spoiler review. This original interpretation uses those sources and accessible excerpt material; it does not claim complete firsthand reading or listening. The novel is an external title, without implied HoneyBooks catalog availability.