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Olivia Atwater's debut, the opening volume of her Regency Faerie Tales trilogy, arrives with a premise so neat it almost sells itself. Theodora Ettings - Dora to everyone who matters - lost half her soul to a faerie lord as a small child, rescued from complete abduction by a swift pair of iron scissors. The consequence is a young woman who feels everything at a muted, distant register: no fear, no embarrassment, no flinch at scandal. In Regency London, where a debutante's social fate hinges on the ability to blush on cue, this is a problem. It also turns out to be the most quietly radical thing about the book.

The easy shorthand is Bridgerton crossed with Howl's Moving Castle, and the comparison is fair enough for the back cover. Atwater has all the furniture in place: the marriage-minded aunt, the beloved cousin whose Season is the ostensible reason for the trip to town, and the brusque, unsuitable love interest in the form of Elias Wilder, the Prince Regent's own Lord Sorcier. The banter between Dora and Elias is genuinely clever, and it is where the novel earns most of its charm. He is rude, overworked and furious at the world; she is incapable of being flustered by any of it. Their courtship unfolds through conversation rather than heaving glances, and it is all the better for that.

What lifts the book above pleasant pastiche is the sharp turn it takes toward the Cleveland Street workhouse. Elias, who has climbed into high society from nothing, holds the aristocracy in undisguised contempt, and Atwater uses his anger to drag Dora - and the reader - into London's poorer rooms. A sleeping plague is picking off pauper children, the magic is indifferent to rank, and the fae-tinged class critique slots in with surprising organic ease. Dora's flattened affect also reads clearly as neurodivergent-coded, and the book handles that with more tenderness than the premise strictly requires.

The weaknesses are the ones a shorter novel tends to inherit. At around three hundred pages the magic system is gestured at rather than built out, the final act in Faerie drags where the London chapters sparkled, and the resolution of Dora's curse arrives faster than the setup deserves. The tonal distance between drawing-room comedy and workhouse horror is not always comfortably bridged, and Elias's early grumpiness is laid on thickly enough to test patience in the opening chapters. The epilogue, however, is genuinely lovely, and does a great deal to settle the book in the memory as warmer than it perhaps is on the page.

Half a Soul is not trying to be important, and occasionally undersells itself because of that modesty. It is clever, kind, quietly angry in the right places, and unusually thoughtful about what a heroine who cannot quite feel her own heart still chooses to do with it. A comfort read with teeth, and worth the short evening it asks for.