This is deliciously what I want Naomi Novik's folklore tales to be, and I suspect the superiority of this one is the novella length. Not trying to stretch it out into a novel-length work made it a folklore-y (with the old-school, mean, fae, not the Disney kind) and romance-y and teasingly just-right-but-almost-not-enough story. Not without flaws

: Mum was extremely deus ex machina

, but satisfying all the same.