The Bisexual Fae Prince Romance That Wrecked Me

A runaway prince, a marriage he didn’t ask for, and a kingdom built on a lie

Here’s the setup. Wyatt Croft is a trans boy who fled the fae realm of Asalin years ago because the fae there, his own found family included, could not fully accept that he was a boy. He’s been hiding out in the human world with the Fales, a human family who took him in, and specifically with Emyr, the fae prince he grew up beside and is quietly, agonizingly in love with. Then Emyr shows up and drags Wyatt back to Asalin because Emyr is now king, the kingdom is falling apart, and he needs Wyatt’s magic, specifically the kind of magic that isn’t supposed to exist anymore, to keep it together. Oh, and Emyr is engaged to marry a girl named Briar Thorne to seal a political alliance, and Wyatt is expected to just live with that.

I want to be clear that I love this premise on paper. A boy dragged back into a world that misgendered and hunted people like him, forced to stand next to the man he’s in love with while that man marries someone else for the good of a country that never protected him. That’s a gut punch waiting to happen. The problem is Edgmon takes a long time actually delivering it. The politics of Asalin (who’s in the Guild, who has power, why witches are hunted, what the alliance with Briar’s people even means) get explained in chunks that feel more like homework than tension. I found myself rereading paragraphs trying to track which faction hated which other faction and why, and I write book reviews for a living, so if I’m confused, I promise you will be too.

Where it actually earns its keep

What saves the book, and eventually saves my opinion of it, is Wyatt himself. He is furious in a way YA protagonists are rarely allowed to be. Not quippy-furious, not “kickass heroine” furious. Actually corroded by resentment, short with people who love him, cruel to himself in ways that read true rather than performative. There’s a scene where he’s forced to sit through court functions being deadnamed in every way but literally, watching Emyr be polite to a girl he’s supposed to marry, and Edgmon lets Wyatt be petty and mean about it instead of noble and sad. I respected that. Most books flinch from letting their traumatized protagonist be unlikable. This one doesn’t flinch.

Briar Thorne is the other reason to stick around. She’s set up as the obstacle, the girl standing between Wyatt and Emyr, and then Edgmon does the thing you hope for and rarely get: she becomes a person instead of a plot device, with her own reasons for being in this marriage and her own complicated read on Wyatt. Their dynamic shifts in a way that genuinely surprised me, and I don’t say that lightly because I’ve read enough YA fantasy love triangles to see the twist coming from orbit. I didn’t see this one coming, or at least not the shape it took.

The criticism I’ll actually stand behind: this book needed another editing pass on structure. Big emotional confrontations get interrupted by exposition about magic rules. The pacing in the middle third sags hard, to the point where I put it down for almost two weeks and had to backtrack twenty pages to remember who was mad at whom. I read most of it curled up in a beanbag chair at my sister’s apartment during a visit where I was supposedly there to help her pack, and I remember feeling guilty every time I got sucked back into a chapter instead of taping boxes, which tells you the good parts really are good. It’s just surrounded by parts that needed trimming.

Am I being too hard on a debut YA fantasy for not reading like a Robin Hobb novel? Maybe. I go back and forth on whether I’m holding this to a standard it never promised to meet. It’s angry and horny and messy on purpose, and some of what reads as “pacing problems” to me might just be a book that cares more about emotional truth than plot mechanics. I still think both things can be true at once: it’s doing something real with Wyatt’s rage, and it’s also structurally uneven. Neither cancels the other out.

This is a book about the specific cruelty of being asked to be grateful for a home that never fully wanted you as you are.

About H.E. Edgmon

H.E. Edgmon is a trans, nonbinary author who writes the kind of YA fantasy that clearly comes from lived frustration rather than a marketing meeting. The Witch King was their debut, and you can feel that in both directions: the raw nerve of Wyatt’s anger reads like someone who has actually sat in rooms being misgendered by people who claim to love them, and the structural wobbles read like someone still figuring out how to build a plot sturdy enough to hold that anger. Edgmon has been open about writing trans characters who get to be difficult and unlikable, not just brave and inspirational, and honestly, that’s the most interesting thing about their whole approach.

If Wyatt’s rage got under your skin, read these next

For more furious trans protagonists refusing to be palatable, try Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender, which trades fae politics for art school but hits a similarly raw nerve. If you want the found-family-versus-blood-family ache without the fantasy trappings, Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas scratches a similar itch with better pacing. And if the arranged marriage with unexpected feelings for the “obstacle” character is what hooked you, An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir gives you that dynamic in a much tighter, more brutal package.

For your book club

1. Wyatt is deliberately written as unlikable at times. Did that make him more real to you, or did it make the book harder to enjoy?
2. Briar Thorne could have stayed a flat obstacle character. What moment made her click into a real person for you?
3. Asalin’s politics are dense and sometimes confusing. Did the world building enhance the story’s stakes or get in the way of them?
4. How does Edgmon use Wyatt’s trans identity as the emotional engine of the plot rather than just a detail about him?
5. Would this book have worked better as a single standalone, or does the story need the full trilogy to pay off what it sets up here?