A Power Unbound by Freya Marske

RomanceFantasyHistorical

Feb 24

Written By taylor shepeard

Title: A Power Unbound

Author: Freya Marske

Publication Date: November 7, 2023

Audience: Adult

Genre: Fantasy

Sub-Genre: Historical Fiction / Romance

POV: Dual

Series: Trilogy

Format: Audiobook

—Narrator(s): Josh Dylan

4.75 ⭐ | 3🌶️

Pros:

✨Authentic Romance
✨Queer Representation
✨Character Development and Relationships
✨Interwoven Plots / Pacing
✨Magic System / Setting
✨Smut

Cons:

✨Predictable Mystery

Synopsis

Jack Alston, Lord Hawthorn, would love a nice, safe, comfortable life. After the death of his twin sister, he thought he was done with magic for good. But with the threat of a dangerous ritual hanging over every …

… magician in Britain, he’s drawn reluctantly back into that world.

Now Jack is living in a bizarre puzzle-box of a magical London townhouse, helping an unlikely group of friends track down the final piece of the Last Contract before their enemies can do the same. And to make matters worse, they need the help of writer and thief Alan Ross.

Cagey and argumentative, Alan is only in this for the money. The aristocratic Lord Hawthorn, with all his unearned power, is everything that Alan hates. And unfortunately, Alan happens to be everything that Jack wants in one gorgeous, infuriating package.

When a plot to seize unimaginable power comes to a head at Cheetham Hall—Jack’s ancestral family estate, a land so old and bound in oaths that it’s grown a personality as prickly as its owner—Jack, Alan and their allies will become entangled in a night of champagne, secrets, and bloody sacrifice . . . and the foundations of magic in Britain will be torn up by the roots before the end.

*Blurb taken from The StoryGraph

Review

This review may contain spoilers.

The last book in Marske’s The Last Binding trilogy, we follow Earl Lord Hawthorne and journalist Alan Ross as the final race to save British magic unfolds.

Of all three books in the trilogy, this was my favorite! Marske did a fabulous job tying up the threads of the Last Contract via a comprehensive understanding of magic that at no point felt like an info-dump, but rather, like a growing revelation. The plot took off at a run and kept me flipping the pages, and I love that we saw a lot of our protagonists from the first two books. Jack and Alan were visceral characters, and I enjoyed reading both of their POVs.

This book dips a bit more into kinks and role play, but the scenes all further Jack/Alan’s character development and relationship via its focus on power dynamics, which was wonderful, as Marske manages to touch on social issues without turning her cast into mouthpieces giving out-of-character diatribe’s. We even get an itty-bitty heist in here that’s executed quite well. Truly, a great novel. If I don’t ever go back and reread the entire trilogy, I will, at the very least, reread this installment!