“If my love were an earthly night,/As he’s an elfin grey,/I wad na gie my ain true-love/for nae lord that ye hae.” It’s that pesky ain true-love problem again, source of every romance novel ever written. The defiant speaker is a teenage girl talking to her long-suffering father. Her barriers to happiness are many. For a start she is pregnant by a man who is perhaps not totally human. We know of her predicament via the Scottish ballad “Tam Lin.”

A historical fantasy based on this ballad, Janet McNaughton’s An Earthly Knight is a compelling read. From the ballad’s bones she creates a fully realized world, set in the lowlands of Scotland during the reign of King Malcolm IV in the mid-12th century. Jeanette, daughter of the noble but financially struggling Vicomte Avenel, is betrothed to the King’s brother William. This betrothal is a coup and Jeanette could be the saving of the Avenel fortunes. Unfortunately her heart lies with a neighbour boy, Tam Lin. Recently returned from a stint as a prisoner of the fairies, Tam is considered unsuitable, if not mad.

Fairy fancier that I am, I represent the ideal reader for this book. I’m going to rush to press it upon readers of The Folk Keeper by Franny Billingsley and Geraldine McCaughrean’s The Stones are Hatching. McNaughton is a student of folklore but she wears her learning lightly, seamlessly weaving into her tidy plot elements of fairy belief such as the “glamour,” an illusory spell that fairies cast upon ordinary objects to make them appear rich and splendid. She incorporates into the conclusion of the book the poignant belief, which every generation holds, that the fairies are disappearing. “The forest of the fairies was falling for pasture. The Church would surely drive the fairies from the land forever.”

But the potential readership of An Earthly Knight is not limited to those of my ilk. McNaughton has fashioned a tale of suspense and romance. The suspense is that of the ballad form, which creates tension by repeating questions that delay the punchline until the listener wants to jump up and shake the story out of the singer. McNaughton creates a similar effect by a delayed answer involving Jeanette’s sister Isabel whose story is based on the chilling ballad “The Outlandish Knight.” Isabel has recently returned to her father from a shameful escapade during which she ran off with a handsome, charismatic stranger, only to return alone and disgraced three days later. What happened during those three days? Isabel is silent. We have to wait for the revelation in the final chapters. But it’s worth the wait. Betrayal, revenge, murder – those ballads went in for big effects.

The effectiveness of the romance depends on the characters of the rival lovers, William and Tam. William, who in real life became King William the Lion, a clever and effective ruler, is, in this narration, a sort of testosterone-poisoned thug. In contrast Tam is a romantic hero for our times: gentle, thoughtful, selfless, and intuitive. He even cooks. He is a millennial sensitive new-age guy. In a straight historical novel this wouldn’t wash but this is historical fantasy and Tam is under the influence of the fairies. Fairies can be anything we want or need them to be. That’s why we devise them.

There are moments in this novel where one senses McNaughton straining to deal with historical attitudes that the contemporary reader will find baffling or repellent, attitudes to male power, to violence, to infant mortality. She seems more at ease with a recreation of quotidien life in the period, especially as it relates to women and their work. But if the novel is not totally successful as historical fiction it nonetheless is a very good young adult book. Using all the elements of the teen romance including parental disapproval, unplanned pregnancy, and the sumptuous description of clothes, McNaughton creates a fiction of considerable breadth. She is respectful of the experience of youth, demonstrating that what happens during these years matters greatly. Tam may be finally freed from the fairy curse by Jeanette’s loving courage but he will carry that world with him always. As Tam exists between fairy and folk so Jeanette is a young woman divided between her two heritages, Scottish and Norman. To grow up, the two have to invent themselves, thus participating in the universal task of adolescence.