A Not So Marvellous Light

I don't write this blog to slag off books. In fact, it's very rare for me to review books I hate, since I don't finish them. Even books that I've been highly critical of on here, I've more-or-less considered the experience a net positive. 

And I try to be responsible; for all that my audience rarely reaches above one or two, I would never take pot-shots against a self-published or indie author, or at otherwise easy targets.

But sometimes a book betrays you. Sometimes you, the reader, are the injured party. Sometimes writing a thousand word blog piece is your only source of justice.

So, what did A Marvellous Light [Freya Marske] do to earn this dubious honour? And what is it about?

Robin has just inherited the family estate but has been denied the family money, forcing him to fail-up into a civil service role. He soon discovers that he is actually the Prime Minister's liaison to the magical business of the country. His predecessor has vanished without a trace and he is vastly underqualified, only discovering the existence of magic several hours into his first day.

He meets Edwin, a studious but magically underwhelming colleague who is the runt of a truly great magical family's litter. When Robin is cursed by the people seeking his predecessor’s secret, the two travel to Edwin's family home to try and break the curse - growing increasingly intimate along the way.

Robin is as much of a fists-first-thoughts-several-days-later himbo as a British Edwardian noble can be, and Edwin is your basic ball of grumpy family-issues angst.

Emma, I hear you say, are you sure this isn't a Drarry fanfiction? You love Drarry fanfictions! Gay Edwardian magical angst? That sounds like a perfectly brewed cup of your favourite Yorkshire tea. What could this book possibly have done that deserves this level of ire?

Well, for the first half of the book - nothing. In fact, I was having a great time. Maybe I'll give it 4.5 stars, I thought, in what now seems like a moment of lunacy. I was already considering forking out £9.99 for the sequel. Sure the magic system was on the wishy-washy yes-we've-all-read-Harry Potter side, but the plot, characters, setting and romance were engaging.

Then at the halfway point, the book collapses on just about every front. It keeps attempting to get up again, but repeatedly pratfalls, to the point that it doesn't so much end as trail off awkwardly, with a muttered 'we'll deal with all that other stuff in the sequel'.

It starts after the two main characters go on their separate ways thanks to a fairly forced break-up. The book hasn't developed any other characters, so having them separated is immediately tedious. Robin's secretary is meant to be a cool badass main character but barely does anything except contact her more powerful sister for assistance.

Side note: this otherwise posh-white book could not be more self-congratulatory about her Indian heritage if it threw a diversity parade in its own honour.

Up until the halfway point, the goal has been to lift Robin's curse. A very clear and understandable goal with a real impact on the character. At the halfway point it's lifted, at which point the goal shifts to finding a nebulous McGuffin.

What is it? We don't know. What can it do? An unspecified bad thing. Who wants it? Mysterious bad people. Why should I care? Because it's (possibly) a ring. People love magical rings!

The lack of other character development becomes a problem, fast. The secretary has a huge clue to the McGuffin but only for the thinnest of reasons (oh, the mysterious ring your boss gave you as a birthday gift when it wasn't your birthday several days before he died was important? Who'da thunk it!) When the first baddie is revealed in a Scooby Doo 'it's you!' moment I literally had no idea who he was. I had to go back and check. When the 'real' baddie showed up... well... my socks didn't have to worry about being blown off. They remained firmly in place.

I found myself skimming through the final dramatic scenes, tuning in only to find a new moment so cringe-worthy that I immediately went back to skimming. Oh look he's threatening to kill himself rather than have the baddie hurt his sister (who isn't even present or under any immediate threat.) Oh look they seem to have been taken hostage and forced to go to a magical house that is attuned to the main character... and when the baddie can't get past the wards the moron *asks the house to let the guy through*.

Oh look they are solving the whole thing with a binding legal contract in which they literally negotiate not to be murdered, on the proviso the baddie leaves the immediate vicinity and can continue baddie-ing his way into the sequel. Unsatisfying? Yes. Dull? Oh, incredibly.

Has anything materially changed from the start of the book, beyond them having a boyfriend now? Nope. The book confidently assumes you'll be sticking around for the sequel and so happily dumps every outstanding plot thread into the 'I'll deal with that later' pile. That old chestnut.

There's a ton of other nonsense that I'll skim over in the same fashion I did the last twenty percent of the book: Robin (the muggle) becomes a pre-cog, described as unbelievably rare/valuable and which is bought on by the curse - it's never explained why. Luckily his visions are super unhelpful and the only interesting one is assigned to the long list of 'things that will become relevant in the sequel'. Edwin gains a magical Encanto-like house which he under-utilises. Memory wiping is constantly threatened but never actually used. Robin's finances are a huge source of angst except that any reader with the budgeting nounce of a toddler could solve them (having a townhouse and an estate and a civil service job and a sister who wants education is SO difficult and traumatic, actually.)

This book doesn't know what it wants to be. As an erotic queer romance it works well. As a fantasy novel it's a mess. I suspect that everyone involved was banking on the former being such an audience draw that the latter would be forgiven.

I considered why that annoyed me so much, and I think that - much like the Indian heritage of one character that the book smugly celebrates - it feels like box-ticking without actually delivering. I can imagine some publishing person reading it and doing a mental calculation along the lines of gay porn + less problematic Harry Potter = ka-ching! The actual story matters less because - in their mind - no one is reading it for that. They think we'll rush out and buy the sequel on faith alone. 

Annoyingly, the five-star reviews seem to agree with that assessment.