I am a sucker for everything related to Fairy Bargains, and this book was nothing but Fairy Bargains, piled high and deep, contracts and loopholes and intangible abstractions being traded for other abstract intangibles. The luster of hair, three minutes of life, the strength of ten men, prosthetics of living silver, a golden voice, the vigour of youth and childhood---everything is for sale, and everything can be purchased for a price in the Untermarket, the Goblin Market, below an alternate Victorian London where Queen Elizabeth made a very different bargain with the fairy queen, and built a very different city. 

Deri, an indentured human servant to a powerful merchant in the Untermarket, is ambitious and energetic, and has amassed a tiny hoard of favors and trinkets, baubles he has bargained for in the spare minutes he can shave off the errands he runs for his mystrer. In the course of one of those errands, he helps an inexperienced youth navigate the market in return for three nights out on the town, and then in another bargain manages to lay his hands on the bottled destiny of the heir to the empire. The former he intends to serve merely as a frivolous entertainment; the latter he hopes to use to bargain his way out of his indentures early and set himself up as a merchant of the Untermarket in his own right; but both twine together and grow and expand, and Deri will need all his experience and knowledge of fairy bargains to come out on top.

This book is a wonderful ride, full of rhyming bells and true love and friendship and nascent labour unions, betrayals and intrigue and villainous skullduggery that merits the description 'Dickensian' in more than a few places, and I enjoyed every minute of it.