Getting Bound Up in The Last Binding Trilogy

Welcome to The Afictionado’s Queer Book Rec Bonanza! It’s Pride Month, and to celebrate, I’ll be breaking my usual blogging schedule to post one review a week for the entirety of June.

Let’s kick things off with a spoiler-free recommendation of my late 2023/early 2024 obsession, Freya Marske’s Edwardian fantasy trilogy! Having cryptically mentioned this series, and how much I loved it, no less than twice in one year of blogging, it seems downright uncouth that I haven’t given The Last Binding its own post. So, without further ado…

Our story begins in England, 1908: Sir Robin Blyth takes a civil service job to pay his parents’ debts and finds himself employed as the government liaison to a hidden magical society. Robin is willing to take all this in stride, but swiftly gets roped into a deadly mystery, cursed with strange visions… and entangled in the life of his counterpart, the scholarly and nervous (and… handsome?) magician Edwin Courcey. This is the jumping off point for Book 1, A Marvellous Light. From the initial mystery of a missing person (the man who previously held Robin’s job) and the missing objects he was searching for, a deeper conspiracy spirals out involving ancient magic and those who want to take it for themselves.

Book 2, A Restless Truth, takes us to new narrators and a bit of a genre shift: following the events of A Marvellous Light, Miss Maud Blyth, Robin’s younger sister, throws herself into the world of magic in an earnest attempt to assist with the quest at hand… and quickly finds herself embroiled in a murder mystery aboard a transatlantic cruise. She also becomes embroiled with the actress, magician, and runaway heiress Violet Debenham; and with some familiar faces from A Marvellous Light, including the prickly and brash Jack Alston, Lord Hawthorne. Shenanigans both magical and mundane ensue, leading to Maud and Violet sailing home to safety hand-in-hand and the stage set for a final confrontation between the magical conspirators and the rag-tag group trying to stop them from seizing power.

And finally, Book 3, A Power Unbound, shifts genres and narrators again. After spending two novels kicking and complaining and assuring everyone he will not be dragged into this plot, Jack finds himself a POV character at the centre of the story. His love interest and co-narrator is the sly journalist Alan Ross (birth name Alonzo Cesare Rossi) who brings a class-conscious and political bent to this story about ancient lineages and power-hungry rich boys. Parts of A Power Unbound damn near turn into courtroom thriller, but the finale goes off with a bang in the way you’d expect for a (historical) urban fantasy romp.

I’ve emphasised the shifts in genre in each entry because honestly, one of the things I think Marske does masterfully is make each book feel distinct and different while also maintaining a cohesive vibe that ties them together. The same is true for the romances: Edwin and Robin, Violet and Maud, and Jack and Alan’s respective love stories all hinge on very different dynamics, including some that typically don’t do much for me, yet these three relationships all hooked me emotionally and shone in their own right. A personal favourite, I have to say, is Robin and Edwin: they have a sense of slow-burn progression, of gentle and gradual mutual appreciation from which attraction follows (as opposed to, say, Jack and Alan, who initially hate each other but are struck by horniness nonetheless), and a lovely building tension and intimacy that unfurls into passion at the most satisfying plot moment.

The prose throughout the books is absolutely gorgeous, capturing a historical-style voice while remaining accessible to modern readers, and when it isn’t building atmosphere it’s building a beautiful sense of tenderness and sensuality between the characters. And this is important to me, as someone who is… let’s say increasingly adventurous, but notoriously picky, when it comes to reading fiction with erotica elements. I need convincing that sex is sexy and that two characters are magnetically drawn to each other in an intense, physical way—you can’t just tell me they got horned up and go for it. Just as the romance works for each relationship, the sexual dynamic for each pair is different, too, but each equally sensual and full of believable emotionality.

(I will say though that, well, since I don’t read heaps of erotica, or even just adult romance in general, I have no idea if the sex scenes in these books are industry standard levels of explicit and kinky, tame compared to the norm, or wildly raunchy compared to the norm. So I cannot give you any indication of what to expect on that front, lol. All I can say is that I thought they were nicely-written!)

As characters are of utmost importance, the protagonists and romances are a big part of why I’m recommending this—but let me also take the time to sing the praises of the world and the story itself. The Edwardian Era setting isn’t just stage dressing and the novels are crammed with delectable historical details that both set the scene and tell you plenty about the characters’ tastes, personalities, and frames of reference. The magic system is a delicious mix of whimsical and logical, introduced to us through Edwin’s scholarly mindset and presented as something with distinct rules that can nonetheless be bent or broken if you think about them the right way. Magic, here, relies on spells drawn in the air with hand signals, and reverberates through natural materials due to its connection to the earth. To this end, Violet has a cool collection of rings made of different metals to enhance different types of spells, and a gloriously long segment of A Power Unbound is dedicated to the various magical properties of different types of wood.

The idea of the land being alive with magic is also an important throughline: magical families maintain their power and might by maintaining their ancestral contracts with the physical land they lord over. A stately home isn’t just a nice piece of inheritance for hosting country parties, it responds to its owners’ needs, emotions, and levels of power—it will rebel against interlopers and protect magicians who protect it. The practical ends of this is some truly wonderful and haunting scenes inside houses and landscapes that seem to have a mind of their own, including Violet’s bizarre and ever-moving puzzle box of a townhouse.

Making most of the cast members of the English gentry isn’t just for funsies, then—the idea of inheritance, lineage, and (abuses of) power are woven through the series. The villains take the well of power in their land, and the social position that comes with it, as their birthright, and impose a sense of often violent entitlement over everyone else. The cruelty and carelessness of the rich—from Robin and Maud’s parents, who did philanthropy only to make themselves look good; to the various ways young magicians’ lives are thrown away and treated as expendable in the name of maintaining tradition—is very much the antagonistic force in the series. When dealing with systemic, embedded evils like this, one wonders how the whole thing is going to be “solved” in the end. Without spoiling anything, Marske comes to a place with this thread that I found genuinely satisfying.  

In short, there’s a lot to like about this trilogy: compelling characters, riveting romances, a really clever and fun magic system and setting, and satisfying takes on themes of power and inheritance while also providing plenty of “comedy of manners” romp-age among the old-timey English upper class. If even one aspect of that sounds appealing to you, give this series a shot—it’s complete, and I can’t recommend it enough.

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