Rating: 4.5 stars
Monthly Keyword 26: Light
Nowhere Book Bingo 26: LGBTQIA+ rep
Buzzwords Challenge 26: Parts of a house
Buzzwords Cover Challenge 26: Featuring a silhouette
Sir Robert "Robin" Blyth ends up in a civil service position he is vastly unprepared for, as it turns out, he is supposed to be a liaison between the secret magical world and the more mundane regular world. Usually, the post is held by an individual from a magical family just unlucky enough not to have any magic of their own (seems like there are quite a few such "duds" in the magic-wielding families of society). Robin, on the other hand, is both shocked and rather intrigued when his co-liasion, Edwin Courcey, has to reveal the existence of magic to him.
Edwin Courcey is both annoyed and worried at the disappearance of Robin's predecessor, especially when it becomes clear very quickly that something sinister is probably to blame. When Robin is attacked and a curse is placed upon him, a side-effect also appears to be that he can now receive visions of the future. Unfortunately, they are vague and usually seem to involve strangers. The curse is visible as a strange tattoo on one of Robin's arms, and with each new excruciatingly painful attack, the tattoo climbs higher up his arm, and the pain increases. Edwin can't leave an innocent man who didn't even know magic existed, least of all, where some magical artefact that the villains are searching for is located, suffer and potentially die. Unfortunately, most of the reference books he requires are at his family home, and Edwin doesn't exactly love returning to the bosom of his family.
Edwin may have magical powers, but he is seen as a huge disappointment in the Courcey family. He reluctantly goes back home, bringing Robin with him, to try to find a way to lift the curse. Edwin's plan is basically to get rid of Robin's pesky curse and then magically make him forget he ever even heard of magic (which seems to be the standard way magicians deal with regular humans). There is also the mystery of where Robin's predecessor disappeared to, the identity of the shadowy individuals who cursed Robin, and exactly what the artefact they are looking for is.
This has been on my TBR list for a long time. I was initially waiting for the trilogy, of which this is the first part, to be completed, but by the time that happened, I sort of forgot about the whole series. This year, it fit into several of my reading challenges, however. As so many online friends whose opinions in books I trust have rated it highly on Goodreads, it felt like it was time to pull it off my shelf (I keep all of my unread dead tree books in a bookshelf in my bedroom, in the hopes that it might make me read them faster. Once I finish one, it gets moved up to the living room, where the majority of our fiction books are located.) Since I read this in mid-April and have since completed 22 other books, some of the finer details of the plot are now rather hazy to me. The book starts a bit slow, but once Robin is attacked and cursed, and Edwin realises that he has no choice but to help this handsome golden retriever of a man, I was pretty hooked.
The book is set in Edwardian times, in an alternate history England where magic obviously exists. Robin and Edwin are pretty much opposites, with Robin being, as I previously mentioned, much like a golden retriever, while Edwin is a skittish black cat. Because Edwin has always been made to feel like a failure in his own family and generally lacking among his magical peers, he's got quite a big chip on his shoulder, and Robin's charming himbo ways are both attractive and frustrating to him.
This is a slow-burn romance, but once the men actually admit their feelings for one another (and Edwin gets over a lot of his trust issues), the relationship between them is so beautiful. I also very much liked several of the supporting female characters, including Robin's younger sister (who I think is one of the protagonists of the second novel) and Robin's extremely overqualified and underestimated secretary in the civil service. They were both great.
There's clearly an overarching plot to the series, and some sort of mysterious cult of bad guys who will need to be stopped. However, this book also has a self-contained ending, and I didn't feel the need to rearrange my entire TBR list to read the two sequels right away (I will try to get to them before the end of the year, though).
Judging a book by its cover:
I think the cover of this book is my least favourite thing about it. I have never liked the colour orange, and the orange silhouettes, accompanied by the most hideously busy wallpaper pattern covering the rest of the book, it gives me a headache if I look too closely at it. I would never ever have picked up this book if I hadn't been assured by several people that I trust that it was excellent. I find this cover very ugly.
Crossposted on Cannonball Read.
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