I absolutely adored this magical book following two indentured young men as they try to find clever ways to circumnavigate their magically fueled contracts of indenture. Between the shady Untermarkt where supernatural beings buy and sell things like luck, dreams, and destiny, the delightful characters, the bells, LGBTQIA+ rep, the twisty plot, and vivid descriptions, I don’t know what I loved most! This might be my top 2024 book. 

The magic system and world building are really cool, and the plot and stakes were engaging, but I just couldn't bring myself to truly care about any of the characters. The runaway princess took up a lot of pages for a dead end, I wanted way more early development for Silvestra, and some of the offhand world building made it feel like I missed the intro class for Fae History. At least I didn't have to deal with a miscommunication trope and Owain fully trusted Deri like he was supposed to. It was a sweet romance, but there's just so much else happening and none of it felt like it got the attention and development it deserved.

This book is clever as you need to be to make a profit trading with a goblin. I loved the growing relationship between Owain and Deri, and while it's a bit horny, the writing is very tasteful about it. The conceit of paralleling indentured servitude Above with Untermarkt trades and contracts is excellent. This is a dark book full of exploitation and risks that make it a more stressful book than a comfort read to me. Certainly not a book I'd trade away my memory of to read again for the first time, but I won't write off a re-read having value.

 Set in the bazaar of the bizarre, where fate and fortunes are for sale below the streets of Covent Garden, London we meet Deri. He once was sold to one of the Merchants and has suddenly come into a means of not only extracting himself from his contract but also making a name for himself as a merchant himself. A chance meeting with Owain sets off a whirlwind romance, that may jeopardize this new path Deri is on. Throw in a runaway princess, who sells her royal destiny to a nobody in the Goblin Market, a high-stakes search, and the cool greed of business people and you get the Market of Dreams and Destiny. 

This book was immediately attractive to me. The cover shows old fairytale vibes. The title screams Goblin Market and then delivers on it within the novel. I may have enjoyed this more than I would have if I’d read it because the audiobook did such a good job of pulling me in with the timber of the narrator’s voices. 

I have always loved the idea that you could find your way to the Untermarket and find exactly what you’re looking for, and if you’re really lucky, exactly what you actually need. The world-building, full of alleyways, stalls to pursue, nooks and crannies to explore, was by far some of the best I’ve read in a long time. It made me want to savor each description as if I could walk through those places myself. My only complaint is that the character depth was shallow and their motives predictable. If they’d been more fleshed out, instead of wispy dreams of real people, the book would not only have been longer but would have made it my favorite of the month.  

Very funny and sweet. I loved the system of magic, the worldbuilding, and the fresh take on the goblins. They weren't small greedy green men, they were strange humanoid beings but entirely separate from humanity. Deri was actually clever, which can be very hard to write.

Spice level= T/PG-13/1 (fade to black with a few sexual references thrown in)

Audiobook: Narrator Will Watt was great. Wonderful variety of accents and distinctive character voices. For some reason, particularly toward the end of the book, he started pronouncing Owain as "Owen" about a third of the time which was weird. 4/5 ⭐️

A fantastic read in a fantastical world where Victorian London is entwined with Faerie treaties as part of the historic split from Rome and alliance with druidry. But it's still Victorian England — with its powerful few exploiting the downtrodden many, now with magically binding contracts. Enter Deri, a roguishly clever human assistant in the goblin market that lies beneath the city. It is an absolute joy to watch him barter and negotiate through a series of ever more treacherous high-stakes deals in an effort to secure his destiny, save his life, and free the sweet indentured workshop boy he loves. Everything has a price in this world. Will Deri give up his very heart's desire to achieve the destiny he's been chasing? 

Come buy! Come buy! And see what lies in this pealing tale where all's for sale and love comes dear
twixt hope and fear within the goblin market! 

(Get the audiobook for the 5-star experience. Narrator Will Watt is exceptional.)

I wanted to like it more than I did.  I think the problem for me was that Deri spends the first quarter or so of the book focused on being one of the few human merchants in the goblin market.  While I never had the sense that he had any interest at all in having his own indentured servant(s), he clearly was okay with otherwise exploiting desperate and/or naive visitors to the market and the limiting factor in his willingness to exploit others was less a sense of morality (at least at the beginning) than a lack of skill.  The closer the deal is to being fair the easier it is for the market to work its magic.  It's hard to root for Gordon Gecko, is what I'm saying.

And then he brings up the concept or work to rule. And I love unions, I think they're great.  But I have a really hard time understanding how someone in the society as presented would ever have heard of the concept of working to rule.  And in a society where parents can sell their children into indentured servitude, and where it's clearly permissible to force those indentured servants to work in dangerous conditions that can leave them maimed or dead it's really hard to see why work to rule would even work.  Later on there's some discussion of the contract that offers at least some protections to the indentured servant (and presumably is enforced by magic) but it's not explained until later and we've already seen it's fine to beat indentured servants for "insolence" or as motivation.   But it's really hard to reconcile the threat of violence as a motivating factor (which it sounds like had been employed before) with respecting work to rule.   I guess maybe the magic is supposed to have stopped any retaliation?  

Deri does eventually work to free other indentured servants, but for a long time it's viewed more as a happy byproduct of his plans to free himself and then Owain, not a goal in itself.    I'm not sure that Deri would have tried to free everyone if the owner of his contract hadn't decided to rewrite contracts to further restrict and exploit the indentured class.  

But in the end, the system has only minor changes. It's certainly not abolished.  The idea is that Owain who himself was changed by ingesting a new destiny without informed consent, will be a new prince and I guess have more sympathy for the lower classes which is nice as far as it goes but it wasn't like there was a suggestion that the crown would try and actually alleviate the suffering that caused people to sell their children or themselves into indentured servitude.  The thing that is supposed to stop people from doing that is, I guess, hearing Owain's story.  But I didn't get the impression that people who were desperate enough to sell their freedom didn't understand how bad it might be for them.   They were doing it because they didn't see any other options.  The contract were apparently rewritten in some nebulous way to make things more equal but I don't think it was ever specified what that actually meant.

We also didn't see much of Deri and Owain falling in love. In lust, sure, and I guess technically since Deri was able to sell true love it must be so but there's even a reference to a sort of puppy love and the expectations of others that must be what it is between Deri and Owain.  They meet a handful of time for a few hours at a time and it doesn't seem like enough to be true love.

As a somewhat minor thing, early on it's said that the usual rules about thanking people in Faerie are in place.  There's a slight twist on it here in that in the market it suggests a bad deal was made in your favor so it's an insulting thing to say.  But later on people are constantly thanking each other.  I get it if those outside the market do it, but those raised in it should be much more conscious of it.