This has been on my TBR list for years, mostly because I think I was supposed to have won a copy of it but never got the book and thus never bothered to go find a copy. But I was craving for a fantasy novel and this was available in Libby so I guess I finally picked it up.

The Peculiar starts when a door opens in Bath, connecting the fairy world and the human world. Years later, the fairies are trapped in our world and iron is everywhere. Bartholomew is a changeling, a half-fairy half-human child living in the fairy slum in Bath with his changeling sister Hettie and his mother. One day, a strange woman takes away a changeling child living opposite him, he gets marked, and things start to go wrong.

At the same time, Mr. Jelliby is a vacuous member of parliament who doesn’t really like to work. When he’s called into work to discuss the murders of several changeling children – all found empty – the case disgusts him. But then he’s accused of spying on a fairy nobleman and discovers that there’s something very wrong in this murder case.

I really liked the world that The Peculiar is set in. It makes sense that humans and fairies wouldn’t get along and the set up of the murdered changeling children was a very intriguing one. For the first half of the book, Bartholomew and Mr. Jelliby don’t meet, but as the reader, I could see how the plot was moving forward and was generally enjoying myself.

As main characters, both Bartholomew and Mr. Jelliby are fun to follow. I prefer Mr. Jelliby, mostly because he reminds me a bit of Bertie from the Jeeves and Wooster series, and I like how he tries to do the right thing when it happens. Bartholomew was slightly less likeable, but mostly because he made a decision that I thought was very stupid somewhere in the first half of the book – I did wonder for a while if it was one of those “bad decisions to move plot forward” things and that kind of dampened my enjoyment of the story.

Additionally, I wasn’t fond of the pacing and the ending of the book. The pace was fairly steady for the most part, and then at the end, it just ramped up to an abrupt ending. I remember checking my kobo in the last few chapters because I didn’t think the story could be satisfactorily concluded in such a short amount of space and I was right. The ending was rushed and basically a cliffhanger for book two.

Overall, while I enjoyed the premise and most of the book, I felt quite let down by the way it ended. And because the book ended on a cliffhanger, I don’t think I’ll be looking for the second one.