Title: The Tricky Business of Faerie Bargains

Author: Reena McCarty

Publisher: Orbit/Hachette, 2026; RRP: $34.99

Reviewed by: Marian Chivers, Ballarat Writers Inc. book review group

The author

Reena McCarty is a lifelong Montanan who’s constantly looking for the perfect balance of hiking, camping and impulse baking cakes. She has a BA in theatre, a Masters in library science and somehow ended up cooking for a living and also for fun. When not writing, Reena can often be found wandering in the woods with her husband, admiring every dog she sees. The Tricky Business of Faerie Bargains is her debut novel.

The blurb

Poppy Cook Hill was stolen as a child from her family’s Montana homestead and taken ‘Otherside’ to the land of the Fae, where she spent more than a century as a cook in the Wild King’s castle. Having been returned to the human world, she works for Carter Lane, a company that brokers faerie bargains, checking for loopholes in their contracts because Othersiders (Faerie) are excellent at spotting and making use of loopholes. It’s all in the wording.

When a dodgy bargain that Poppy is negotiating goes badly wrong, she has to return to the world where she grew up (and really the only world she had known) to try to rectify her mistake, facing danger, intrigue, plots and a pesky ex-boyfriend along the way.

The review

Told in the first person, the reader slips effortlessly into Poppy’s world where she is just now adjusting to human life and finding it hard to leave the Otherside behind as it is familiar, though not always comfortable. Her best friend (or is she?), Sloan,

was tall, close to seven feet. Her hair was gold – not blonde, but the garish color of the pure metal. The last time I’d seen her it hung nearly to her knees, but was now cropped close to her skull like a gleaming helmet. Her skin was gold too, but paler, electrum dusted with flour to dull its shine, and her teeth were sharp in her wide smile. Her eyes were blank and black all the way across, empty of expression. The fingers of her hands, which she reached toward me, were longer than a human’s by an extra knuckle each, with talon-like nails as gold as her hair…Sloan didn’t like it when I showed too much emotion. She thought being human was undignified (p.24)

These faeries rarely look like Tinkerbell.

The worldbuilding is consistent and logical. The author’s interests of hiking, camping and cooking all come through strongly within the story as Poppy finds herself trekking around the Wild Lands trying to find the bargained human and bring her back. But there is a lot more happening than Poppy is aware of and she needs to make choices about who to trust, what she needs to do and ultimately what and who is best for her.

The story kept me reading and all that trekking up and down mountains was quite exhausting but it kept me turning the pages and led to a satisfying ending with enough left open to perhaps lead to a sequel.

I loved the cover of this book. It features many of the elements within the book in a pleasingly aesthetic way. My only hesitation is with the standing stones at the bottom of the cover as they’re not exactly as those described in the story. The flat picture here does not do the cover justice. If you enjoy exploring the Otherside/Faerie, this story with violence but no sex will provide an engaging read.