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“The Wicked Fairy. The Mistress of All Evil. The villain of Sleeping Beauty goes by many names, but where did she come from?
Myravelle Spinner grew up in a tower with only spiders, spindles, and stone walls for friends while her mother spun gold for the king. She wondered why her mother refused to teach her fairy magic until one fateful mistake led Myravelle to become the healer in the king’s Sleepy Wood Company…
Drained from years of waking soldiers from a cursed sleep, Myravelle must now choose a new canvas-a man whose life she drains with a dagger to fuel her healing powers. A ritual binds her to Byzarien Dumont, who loathes fairies for the fires that left his family impoverished and his body riddled with scars. His burning hatred causes Myravelle’s enchantments to wither, leading the king to threaten her mother’s life.
Byzarien can only see Myravelle as a beautiful spider who strings men along her web, while Myravelle considers love a weakness for the king to exploit. With their families in danger and soldiers rotting in a death-like sleep, the pair must learn to trust one another before the dark magic spinning in Myravelle’s soul unravels once and for all.
The Wicked Fairy never asked to become a monster …”
Spoiler Alerts & Trigger Warnings: masochism, death
My book for Season 2 Episode 12: A Midsummer Nightmare is Her Dark Enchantments by Rosalyn Briar. Quill & Crow Publishing House published the novel in 2023. It’s a fantasy/romantasy origin story for the wicked fairy of Sleeping Beauty infamy and melds that timeless classic with elements of Rumpelstiltskin and Gregory Maguire’s Wicked.
Mix up my cocktail inspired by this book, Myravelle’s Elixir, and read on for my review of the book.
This is my first time reading a book by Rosalyn Briar. So she’s a new author for me. Briar is a former teacher who is married to her soul mate. According to her website, she “is obsessed with gothic fairy tales, scary movies, sun dresses, traveling, and reading books.” Briar is also a poet and has several published works. Her bibliography includes The Crown of Bones, A Sea of Pearls & Leaves, and The Mermaid & the Pearl.
Now let’s take about the book.
I rank Her Dark Enchantments at a Poblano on our Spicy Scoville scale. The book contains a couple of VERY brief sex scenes that are not graphic. However, as mentioned, there’s some masochism by way of carving runes into the skin as part of the bonding in a magic ritual.
Without further ado, let’s meet the main characters.
Myravelle Spinner — Myravelle is a magical healer for the king’s army. She is the daughter of a fairy named Xylina.
Byzarien Dumont – Byzarien is a soldier in the king’s army.
The prologue of this book is essentially that of Briar Rose (aka Sleeping Beauty) as she is spirited away from the three fairies who raised her and returned to her royal parents just in time to meet the curse of the spindle.
Then we’re dropped into what initially seems like an entirely different story. Byzarien and his comrades are attending the funeral of his best friend Lazaire. Lazaire has died due to his being the “canvas” of the witch who heals the king’s army. Enter Myravelle.
Myravelle is a slave of the greedy king. She’s been his captive her entire life. Her mother is a fairy who was kidnapped by the king and is being held in a tower to spin fiber into gold. Here we have elements of the Rumpelstiltskin story. Once the king discovered Myravelle also has magical powers – in this case, the power to heal – he forced her into service in a company of his army, the Sleepy Wood Company.
This company of men and women searches the Sleepy Wood for a special kind of fairy tree that has wood with magical powers. The problem is, the trees have been cast with all manner of spells and enchantments by the fairies who live there to protect their home and keep the king from getting the magic wood. So the soldiers are often cursed into a nightmare sleep they cannot wake from or they have various body parts become paralyzed.
Myravelle must use her magic to heal the soldiers. This magic entails her having a relationship with a “canvas.” The canvas is someone who bonds with her and she carves runes and symbols into their skin. (There’s no pain involved for the person who is the canvas. In fact, it’s weirdly the opposite because they actually get extremely turned on by the ritual.) Magic is created from that act and it allows her to heal and awaken the fallen soldiers.
But it comes at a price. The canvas eventually dies because their life is essentially drained away as they save the lives of others. So Lazaire was Myravelle’s most recent canvas and the king promised her she would be able to return to her mother with this last person. But, instead, the Captain of the Company and the King tell her she must continue her work or her mother will be put to death.
She’s forced to use her magic to call upon another canvas. She changes her usual spell, though, and adds sweetpea to the potion. She does this so the next canvas will also be someone she can truly bond with as a friend and lover – a soulmate if you will. And, lo and behold, Byzarien is the one cast as her next canvas.
He’s not happy about this and, quite frankly, pissed off his best friend is dead and now he’s going to have the same fate. Of course he blames Myravelle and accuses her of being a witch — even though he knows she’s really a fairy. (And there’s lots of accusations of her being a witch throughout the book. It primarily stems from this magic she’s doing, as well as the war with fairies the kingdom has endured for decades, and people just not really understanding her or her true intentions.)
But Byzarien comes to understand Myravelle doesn’t even want to be doing this type of magic or having these canvases die. She genuinely cares about people and dreams of escaping from the king’s control. Myravelle just wants to live a simple life in a cottage somewhere with her mom. Her and Byzarien fall in love and develop a really strong bond. But the king is a really horrible person. He has Myravelle’s mother killed to keep Myravelle in line and doing what he wants. So Byzarien’s friends help the two of them escape and they try to find the fairies so they can seek asylum and Myravelle can find out who her father is.
That doesn’t go well. They meet the fairy queen. And the queen’s three daughter’s try to teach Myravelle their different types of magic but that doesn’t go well. It’s one disaster after another. And the other fairies are threatened by the fact that Myravelle can do more than just one type of magic. Additionally, the fairy queen turns out to be a really nasty person and, spoiler, the reason Myravelle’s mother was imprisoned. Myravelle and Byzarien also discover the fairies are in league with the king and it’s just a big old mess.
So they escape the fairies and are trying to get back to Byzarien’s friends so they can all defect to another kingdom and perhaps eventually expose everything that’s been going on. But that’s when true tragedy strikes and we see the transition of Myravelle from a good intentioned fairy to a wicked fairy consumed with revenge.
There’s one more big plot twist after that but I won’t give it away in case you’d like to read the book for yourself.
I enjoyed the melding of various fairytales including Sleeping Beauty, Rumpelstiltskin, and Wicked. I would even compare Rosalyn Briar’s writing style to that of Gregory Maguire, the author of Wicked.
Byzarien and Myravelle rescue an injured crow and nurse it back to health and it becomes their pet. And Byzarien names it Little Nightmare. Which I enjoyed and is a nod to Disney’s Sleeping Beauty with the crow that accompanies Maleficent.
Despite the weird masochism thing, the relationship between Byzarien and Myravelle is healthy and loving. They both see past each other’s flaws and physical imperfections and are incredibly supportive of each other.
I also enjoyed the fact that several of Bizarien’s friends are gay or bisexual. In addition, their sexuality is treated with normalcy and respect.
Honestly, what challenges me the most about this book is the ending. The lack of closure in this book was incredibly frustrating for me. The ending is set up in the prologue … but then the actual physical ending of the book never happens. Spoilers: this is a tragedy and there’s no happy ending. I totally get that. And I understand it’s more of an origin story.
But it still needs and easily could have had a clear ending. Instead, we’re left with Myravelle just waiting for Briar Rose to hit her fateful birthday and prick her finger on the spindle. We get nothing after that. Are we just assuming Myravelle will meet the same fate as her cartoon counterpart? Who knows. Because Briar – the author – doesn’t give us the ending. We just know she’s sitting there waiting for Briar Rose with the spindle.
And that’s it. But there’s questions that remain regarding Byzarien (or what’s left of him) and the King and other key characters. And all of that could have easily been tied up in the last chapter or with an epilogue. Fine, there’s no happy ending. But just make that clear instead of an ambiguous hanging chad.
If you like fairytale retellings and origin stories, and don’t mind unfinished story plots or like the idea of drawing your own conclusions for a book, Her Dark Enchantments is a good read. It is quite beautifully written and Briar has a knack for incorporating almost prose-like descriptions into her novel. The intimate scenes between Myravelle and Byzarien are consensual and handled maturely. Though the ending (or lack there of) personally frustrated me, I still enjoyed reading this fairytale retelling overall.
If you want to hear more of my thoughts on the book, you can listen to the podcast episode on your favorite podcast streaming service. Or click here for our in-house podcast player. I share my Romantic Reminder takeaway from the novel. You can also find out if I won the episode Boobie Prize. Want to read the book for yourself? You can get it from The Ripped Bodice here or Amazon here.
Have you read Her Dark Enchantments? Let me know your thoughts on this book in the comments!
We’re Meghan Leigh & Nicole Danielle — two bookish biddies who love to imbibe and share their latest romance novel read. If you find romance novels as much fun as we do & you love a good laugh, then join us each podcast episode for a scandalously good time!
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