👀 First impressions:
Let me be upfront about who is writing this. My shelves are ninety percent fae courts, cursed bargains, enemies to lovers, and men with tragic backstories and unnecessarily good bone structure. So when May We Feed the King started popping up everywhere in 2026, I read the blurb the way I read everything, which is to say I saw “reluctant king,” “courtiers plotting to replace him,” and “laced with desire and longing,” and my brain immediately filed it under romantasy. A soft hearted monarch who never wanted the crown, shoved onto the throne after his brothers died, surrounded by people scheming against him? That is my exact catnip. That is a Sarah J Maas premise.
Some context I probably should have absorbed sooner. Rebecca Perry is a poet with two collections behind her, this is her debut novel, it came out with Granta, and it went on to be longlisted for the Booker and win the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize. Those are not usually the awards my favourite books are winning. I picked it up anyway because the cover is stunning and because I am always looking for the literary book that will scratch the fantasy itch.
The actual novel is two stories. One follows an unnamed curator in the present who builds historically accurate scenes inside old buildings, and who has been given a medieval palace to bring to life for its 750th anniversary while quietly falling apart from a loss she will not discuss. The other follows the King, glimpsed through fragments in her archives. The two start to bleed into each other.
I want to say clearly, before I get into it, that this is not romantasy. It is not fantasy either, really. Setting that expectation early is going to save some people a lot of frustration.
✅ What I Liked:
The atmosphere absolutely delivers. If what you love about fantasy is the feeling of being inside a world, the cold stone and the candle smoke and the sheer weight of a great house, this book has that in abundance. Perry writes rooms better than almost anyone I have read. The food especially. The title is not decorative, and the feasts and dishes and the whole ceremony of serving a king are rendered so vividly I could taste them. Any fantasy reader who has ever skipped ahead to the banquet scene will be very well fed here.
The King himself is a genuinely great character in the way that a certain kind of fantasy hero is great. He is gentle, unsuited to power, aware that everyone around him thinks he is a mistake, and slowly being circled by people who want him gone. That is a tragic golden retriever prince, and I was fully invested in him. There were pages where I got that specific ache you get in book two of a series when you can see where things are heading and you cannot stop it.
The writing is also just beautiful, and I say that as someone who is usually more interested in plot than prose. It is short and precise and never showy. The chapters are tiny, each with its own funny little heading, so despite being a Booker book it moves quickly and never felt like homework.
And there is longing in it. Real, aching, unspoken longing, both in the past and in the present. Perry understands yearning. She simply expresses it through architecture and archives rather than through two people finally kissing in the rain.
❎ What I didn’t Like:
The romance is a ghost. I need to be honest about this because it is the thing I most wanted. There are inklings, suggestions, glances that could be read as something, but nothing is confirmed, nothing is consummated, and nothing is resolved. If you are hoping for a slow burn, this is not a slow burn, it is a candle in another room. Zero spice. Barely any hand touching. I finished it genuinely unsure whether I had read a love story or invented one.
The plot is similarly unwilling to pay off. The court intrigue that hooked me in the blurb never builds into anything with real stakes. Perry is not interested in whether the coup succeeds, she is interested in the fact that we can never really know what happened. That is a completely valid artistic position and it is also the opposite of what I read fantasy for. I kept waiting for the tension to tighten and it kept dissolving.
There is also no magic system, no worldbuilding in the sense we mean it, no map, and no named kingdom. The setting is deliberately vague. For a genre reader that vagueness is disorienting rather than immersive at first, and it took me a hundred pages to stop trying to work out where and when I was.
And the King stays at a distance. We see him through doorways and half heard conversations, never from inside his own head. As a piece of craft it is stunning. As a reader who wanted to fall in love with him, it was maddening. I could not get close enough to him to grieve properly.
📚 Why You Should Read This Book:
Here is who I would actually hand this to. If you are a romantasy reader who is getting a little tired of the same beats and wants something that will reset your palate, this is a gorgeous way to do it. If your favourite parts of fantasy are the courts and the costumes and the atmosphere rather than the battles, you will find a lot to love. If you liked the quieter, sadder, more ambiguous corners of The Song of Achilles or Piranesi, this is closer to that lane than to Maas or Yarros. Susanna Clarke readers in particular should look at this.
I would also recommend it to anyone who reads historical fiction like Hamnet and wants something stranger, and to anyone who is a museum person, a National Trust person, an “I read every caption” person.
I would not recommend it if you need a romance arc to complete, if you want stakes and a climax, or if you are looking for your next comfort reread. It is not that book and it never pretends to be.
💭 Final Thoughts:
I liked this a lot more than I expected to and enjoyed it less than I wanted to, which is a strange place to end up. On a sentence level it is one of the most beautiful things I read this year. As an experience it left me hungry, and I am fairly sure that was the point, which does not entirely stop it being frustrating.
For me the gap is simple. I read fantasy and romance because I want to be inside a feeling completely, and this book is built to keep you just outside, peering in. That is a real achievement and it is also not what I come to a story for. I finished it admiring Perry enormously and wishing she had written the book my genre brain kept trying to make it into.
If you take it on its own terms rather than mine, it is close to flawless. On my terms, it is a beautiful, chilly, gorgeously dressed almost.
Final Rating ★★★★ – All the longing, none of the payoff, and a palace you will not want to leave
About the Reviewer
Tessa
Hi, I’m Tess, and I’ve never met a book I couldn’t have an opinion about. I read a bit of everything, from twisty thrillers to slow, quiet literary fiction, and I promise to always tell you the truth about whether it was worth your time.
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