A RESTLESS TRUTH is an adventure packed cruise with an impulsive heroine who gets what she wants by charm and stubbornly steamrolling everyone else into agree. Maud is just an absolute delight of a heroine, unworldly enough that she's still fiercely clinging to hope and the belief that things and people can be good. And despite getting more aware of the world, she never loses that part of her, which is why you want her to succeed so much.

She is balanced by the cool, calculating performer, who has so many layers and disguises that it's fun to have them slowly peeled back to reveal a raw core. And also a self-assure young woman who delights in scandalising people is just so much fun to read about.

This is also a book where the two leads gather a crew about them (well, Maud gathers the lot of them and effectively bullies them into helping.) Not only did that wider core cast really help separate A RESTLESS TRUTH from the close character feel of A MARVELLOUS LIGHT, but it was also just simply a delight to have all that banter and the marvellous group dynamics. They play off each other so well. There's one returning character who played a very small role in the first book and he was so much fun in this one. We see more of him and peel back the façade. I really hope the whole gang come back for the final book.

A RESTLESS TRUTH has a locked house murder feel. The murderer could be anyone onboard, and they cannot escape into the anonymity of London. Equally, though, Maud et al cannot escape the murderers. Balanced alongside the tension that set up brings was also delightful escapades. There are performances and silly situations created to cover for the investigation, leading to a hilarious web of scandal and lies. I loved that aspect, chuckling through a lot of them.

This book has less of a standalone feeling than the last. While the main story is completely encapsulated within the book, leading to a feeling of completeness and no cliff-hangers, the book is clearly building on the previous - and excitingly setting things up for the next instalment...

The romance of A Restless Truth clicked with me in a way its predecessor's didn't, and I don't think it's just because it's sapphic (although obviously I love that). I find the characters so complex and believable, particularly Violet, who is such a fascinating figure - although a part of me wonders if it'd have been even better if we didn't have her POV so we could be as confused and doubtful as Maud. Their relationship feels appropriate to the short timescale of the book, while also having real depth as they both work through what they want, with no easy answers. Even if I am not a huge fan of sex scenes, I do think these ones were compelling, realistic, and acted as clear points of development in the characters' arcs. My problem is that I wish this was just a fantasy romance (or even a non-fantasy romance): to me, the Last Contract plot is more hindrance than hook, and it makes this book so much longer than it needs to be. The villains can feel quite flat compared to the main cast, and I didn't love every time a new development happened which seemed only to prolong the plot. Half its length, and centred on the thematically and emotionally resonant tales of Maud and Violet, I think this could have been truly special; as it is though, I did like it more than I expected and I greatly respect the things it did well.

I loved this sequel almost as much as the first in the series. It helped that we as readers already had the introduction to the magic system as we were thrown into another murder mystery, this time focused on Robin’s sister Maud. Maud, while an interesting character to view the story through, at times felt a little too two-dimensional as a feminist Victorian lady wishing to attend university and discovering her queerness. However, at other times, her characterization subverts her surface stereotypes to much delight. That being said, I will never tire of queer historical fantasy.
Violet is an excellent side character turned romantic interest as she has embodies everything Maud wishes she could be: free. I loved her banter especially. I also was surprised to enjoy the presence of minor characters from the first book as well.
While not quite as fast-paced as the first installment because, as like Maud, we’ve already been introduced to the magic and the wonder has started to fade, this book remains an excellent addition to the series. A lighthearted, fun murder mystery may seem an oxymoron but that’s exactly how I would describe this book. I can’t wait for the next installment!

I think it’s safe to say that ‘A Restless Truth’ was one of my most anticipated reads of this year. So I’m not exaggerating when I say that I feel EXTREMELY lucky to have been able to read the ARC of this book! Because it’s safe to say that this book has become a new top favourite of mine!

‘A Restless Truth’ picks up things a few months after the events of ‘A Marvellous Light’. This time we follow Maud Blyth (the younger sister of Robin Blyth -one of the main characters of the previous book), as she embarks on an ocean liner bound for England with a careful mission. But all her previous plans change when someone appears death on the first day of their voyage.

With the help of some unexpected help (including the outrageous Violet Debenham), Maud will try to solve the mystery of this untimely event and keep her original promise to her brother…

‘A Restless Truth’ is a worthy sequel to ‘A Marvellous Light’. Like its predecessor, the characters and their setting shine throughout each of the pages. There’s something familiar and yet different in these pages that introduce us to two new main characters, racing against the clock to solve this unexpected mystery before it’s too late.

We got to know some bits and pieces of Maud Blyth in ‘A Marvellous Light’, but it’s in this book where she absolutely shines, where we really know the younger Blyth.

Like Maud, during this journey we’ll meet Violet Debenham, an actress who have just inherited an impressive fortune, and who’s prone to some scandalous behaviour. These two will meet by random chance, and ally in this unexpected quest that will bring all sorts of chaos. Seeing how their relationship grew throughout the story was an absolute delight.

The banter is exquisite, the heartfelt moments are eager to pull many heartstrings, and the mystery will keep many people’s attention.

There’s so much I want to say about this book, because it totally captured my heart. But since I don’t want to spoil much, I will only say two more things:

1 ) If you loved 'A Marvellous Light', you should totally check this one out! It keeps every single piece of magic than its predecessor displayed, broadening that world and all its possibilities, and bringing more characters that will, hopefully, play a part in the following chapter of this series. It may be a bit different, but it shares the same heart as ‘A Marvellous Light’. ‘A Restless Truth’ is chaotic, intriguing, heartfelt, and overall magical.

2) I don’t know how to properly explain it. But everyone who’s comparing it to ‘Knives Out’ is right! Those two stories have similar vibes, even if their plots differ in many things. So if you loved the chaos of ‘Knives Out’, make sure to check this book out!

The perfect blend of mystery romance, and trunks full of pornography. Lush characters and a setting that had me yearning for a Titanic rewatch.

An engaging and well written novel. I loved Marske's writing style and would definitely recommend. The perfect book for a chill Autumn evening.

Keywords: magic, romance, murder mystery, quest, LGBT, graphic sex scenes.

In short: A good, interesting murder plot with quest elements along side a strong main romance plot but be warn this story contains very graphic sex scenes that would make most people blush.

3 stars

Full review :

The restless truth is the second book in the last binding series and follows on almost straight from a marvellous light where the Blyth family stumbles across a magical conspiracy fraught with danger but also unexpected love.

Like many magical books recently Freya follows a popular format where each book follows a different set of main characters in the same world with a few recurring side characters, following this structure the restless truth follows Maud Blyth, the sister of Robin who was the star of book one as she continues the quest to stop a big magical company releasing a very bad magical attack.

The vibe of book one was adventurous, witty and thrilling wrapped with a strong romance element, the same can be said of a restless truth but I did find that this romance was ramped up to the point that some scenes were too graphic and it definitely cross the boarder into erotica. It almost made it seem like you were reading two different books and this did create somewhat of a discord in places.

Despite this, the story pulls you with it at a steady pace while the audience alongside the characters try to solve a magical who done it while riding the roller-coast of emotions of who and how to love in a world that has a rigid structure about the nature of love.

This story is fun and exciting with characters that are fully formed and full of life and despite sometimes its shocking nature it will keep audiences turning the pages long into the night and eagerly awaiting for book three.

Freya's fans will certainly not be disappointed by this sequel to A Marvellous Light. I definitely liked the idea of taking one of the lesser characters in the first book and giving her a story of her own however I don't feel you need to have read the first book to enjoy this just as it is. I liked the mystery and the pace of the book but did skip over the interminable sapphic sex scenes. Not my cup of tea, although I am sure will be devoured by many!
Overall a good story which has me interested in seeing how it resolves in the next book.

After absolutely devouring A Marvellous Light, I wanted MORE, so I was super excited to read this. And I really enjoyed it!

This particular mash-up of genres (historical romance, fantasy, and murder mystery) seems to work really well for me. The book was off to a pretty slow start, but then there were enough reveals to keep me hooked.

I do have to admit this book worked slightly less well for me than A Marvellous Light. This is purely based in personal preference: the focus in this book was more on the mystery than on the romance, whereas I would prefer it the other way around. Especially because I really loved Maud and Violet!

But after finishing the book and reading the epilogue, I do have to say again that it's left me craving more!

Actual rating 3.5 stars.

I loved this story, and at the same time, it didn’t meet up to my expectations for a very stupid reason. A very me-thing, so don’t let me discourage you from reading this story! Let me take you back to last year.

A Marvellous Light was my first audiobook ever, and it was also my last. I might pick up one in the future again, but I found out that only listening to a book wasn’t my cup of tea. Therefore I decided to alternate between the audio and the ebook. I hated the speed (yes, I adjusted it several times) and that I couldn’t simply leaf back. What I loved, though, was this posh voice narrating the audiobook, and while I was reading the ebook, I heard this voice in the back of my head. It gave such a beautiful extra layer to the story. And while reading A Restless Truth, I missed the narrator's voice in the back of my head. I know, very stupid reason. I still liked the story and recommend it to anyone who loved the first book in this trilogy, and it’s perfectly readable as a stand-alone.

Again, Freya Marla’s writing is descriptive, vivid, and humorous, filled with magic and a mystery in between. I already liked Maud in A Marvellous Light, and I became her fan even more in this book. She and Violet (I adored Violet, she made me smile so much!) made up for missing Robin and Edwin because I had hoped to meet them a bit more. I read somewhere that they will be back in the last book of this series, and I’m really looking forward to that story!

Following on from A Marvellous Light (in which our unmagical Edwardian protagonist discovers the secret magical society of Britain, which in a shocking coincidence needs his help in a matter of the highest stakes) and the discovery that Robert Blyth can see the future, and may need to use this power to help British magic, A Restless Truth picks up with Maud, his younger sister, who has followed his visions and investigations to fetch an elderly woman (another member of the Forsythia Club) from the USA so that they can safeguard her piece of the Last Contract. Of course, this does not quite go to plan, and instead of a leisurely cruise across the Atlantic back to England, Maud finds herself trying to solve a murder and elude thieves, all while trapped in a boat and uncertain whom to trust.

Where its predecessor rushes us throughout magical Britain on a somewhat whistlestop tour of the world Marske has created, A Restless Truth slows things down a little. The scene has been set, the stakes made clear, for what's going on in the overarching plot of the series, so there's time to leave our new protagonist Maud all at sea (wahey), and allow us to get to know her a little better. In fact, as Marske has Maud point out several times, the time spent travelling aboard ship is a liminal one, and the story plot mirrors this large - it embraces wholeheartedly that it's a middle novel in a trilogy, and instead of trying to alleviate the problems that normally brings, instead, it leans in hard.

And, for the most part, this works. It's not a book trying to be a dramatic start or end. Instead, it's a story that's all about how the pieces fit together, how beginnings become ends, discovering and changing. There's still a proper story to it, of course - Maud has her murder to solve - but in terms of where it fits into the metanarrative of a trilogy, Marske has embraced the middleness, the necessity of taking those fledgling ideas of Book 1 and fleshing them out, using them to lay the groundwork for the dramatic ending piece, and made a conceit of it. It is, overwhelmingly, a book about contextualising information we already have, or expanding it, with a murder mystery as a way to hold it all together, but somehow, because we're in on the joke, it doesn't feel all that clunky. And the information is really well integrated into the story as it's told - there are a number of characters who feel the need to tell Maud things about how the world works, but each time it feels very natural, very of the moment and necessary, and so it's easy to let that flood of information pass by unremarked.

Of course, part of the reason it feels so natural and necessary is that Maud is painfully naive. Where Robert as the protagonist of A Marvellous Light is ignorant of magical society, he is at least relatively worldly beyond that sphere - he confidently inhabits the world as he knows it in exactly the way you'd expect someone from the Edwardian nobility to do. Maud, however, is younger, more sheltered, and obviously a lot more female, and so her experiences of the world outside her parents, her brother and her close friends are... limited. Which is great, because it means she needs to be told things about magic, about the society she lives in, that we, as readers need to know. But it's also not great, because it doesn't always make her a fun character to live inside the head of. She has a number of "oh sweetie no" moments throughout the plot, and they're all very realistically done, I can see exactly how things lined up such that we'd be where we were... but that realism made them awkward and uncomfortable to read.

Luckily, Maud is balanced out by our other protagonist. Much like Edwin's magical expertise and introverted personality existed in A Marvellous Light as a pleasant contrast to Robert's labrador-jock energy, so here Maud's naivety wrapped over a core of solid self-belief and determination are counterbalanced by the very worldly, scandalous, but (unsurprisingly) haunted and insecure Violet. Violet has run away to the US in a flurry of gossip and is returning to Britain to claim a fortuitous inheritance. Violet is absolutely determined to be thought of as a strumpet and a scandal, and delights in knowing what's what - magically, societally and indeed, romantically. But this is where some of the awkwardness comes in. While Edwin is a shy love interest, he comes into the story knowing himself, his preferences, his sexuality, and so it's about them both realising there's a mutual interest. In A Restless Truth, we need to watch Maud... discover lesbians are a thing. And how sex works. And how porn is sometimes unrealistic. It's... a lot. Mostly well-managed, and with a surprisingly good use of what felt like period appropriate language to communicate what was being discussed (although, warning for those of a delicate constitution, the c-word gets dropped frequently and with casual abandon). But even the best handled version of the story still has a fairly short amount of time (the boat journey is less than a week) for someone to go from nought to romance. On the whole, I think it's good, and in some ways the ending has a pleasing realism that is often lacking in this kind of story, but it doesn't have quite the impact Marske manages for the romance between Robert and Edwin.

Outside of the dynamic between Maud and Violet, there are some wonderful characters and interactions - the curmudgeonly, dickish Hawthorn from A Marvellous Light makes a return, and even gets a genuine character arc, as well as all the best dialogue lines. There are also several old ladies who do not get relegated to the background, and in fact have interesting and genuine impacts on the plot, in ways that older female characters rarely manage, which was a delight.

We also get one relatively major character who isn't from the British nobility, and while we could have done with more of his dialogue and general story, Marske does use him to undercut some of the upper-class-overwhelm she's created, and remind us all that most of the cast of characters are living lives of extreme privilege. It's not entirely enough, but it is there, and when he does speak, Alan Ross brings something entirely necessary to the page. I'm hoping this is something we see more of in the third book of the trilogy. Alas, the same can't be said of race - one black American character (a singer) is introduced extremely briefly, but her page time is negligible, and the hint that we get when she's introduced that more might be done with her role in the story is quickly abandoned.

What does come through pretty hard, and that was mostly missing from A Marvellous Light, is an awareness of gender and gender roles in Edwardian society. Some of it is the bits you'd expect - Maud is a keen supporter of suffrage and wants to go to university - but some of it is also the flip side, with both Maud and Violet at times weaponising their femininity to get what they want from other people. At one point, Maud does so to one of the people working on the ship, and we see the scene through Violet's eyes, with an appreciation and a disdain for the manipulative nature of it all. Likewise, we get Violet's story of a woman "ruined" by sex and scandal, and going from British high society to being an actress in America, and how that impacts her day to day, how she is seen and how she has to curate her image, and critically, how she is fully aware that her survival in the role of strumpet is only possible because of the fortune she's inherited. None of these are the focus of the story, but they demonstrate Marske's interest in having us really inhabit the protagonists' realities, and they're all details I thoroughly enjoyed.

As well as these themes, the major one that runs through not just Maud's story but Violet's and even Hawthorn's as well, is the idea of how our families make us who we are - whether by example, by force or by leaving us determined to be the opposite of their expectations, and how different people reckon with that as they grow, or how they are unable to do so (because magic can make abstractions entirely real, for exciting heavy-handed metaphors). Within the major plot, there are a lot of threads about legacy, about what we leave behind, and the people it's left to, and about coming back to the things that made you who you are, and maybe realising you missed some truths, or assumed things unfairly as well. What we got in A Restless Truth was really well done on these, but the fullness of it won't be seen until we get the resolutions in the final volume.

On the whole, A Restless Truth is a good sequel to A Marvellous Light - deciding not to do entirely the same thing all over again (which would have been so easy to slip into), but instead embracing the need for a more settled, character and exposition-focussed interlude, before we presumably resume the action in book three. It lacks some of the impact and charm of its predecessor, but still manages enough joy and sparkle to be entirely worth the read, and makes me just as keen as I'd hoped to be to read the final volume of the story.

Maud Blyth has always longed for adventure. She’d hoped for plenty of it when she agreed to help her beloved older brother unravel a magical conspiracy. She even volunteered to serve as an old lady's companion on an ocean liner. But Maud didn't expect the old lady to turn up dead on the very first day of the voyage.

Now she has to deal with a dead body, a disrespectful parrot, and the lovely, dangerously outrageous Violet Debenham. Violet is everything Maud has been trained to distrust, yet can’t help but desire: a magician, an actress and a magnet for scandal.

Surrounded by open sea and a ship full of suspects, Maud and Violet must learn to drop the masks they’ve learned to wear. Only then might they work together to locate a magical object worth killing for – and unmask a murderer. All without becoming dead in the water themselves.

The kind of twisty, jet-fueled thriller that explodes on page one and has you happily abandoning work, sleep, and life as you race to the stunning end. Don't miss it!

Freya Marske has done it again!
I absolutely loved A Marvellous Light, so I had high expectations for the second book , and I'm glad to say that it definitely did not disappoint!

A sequel to a book I enjoyed that I've seen described as sapphic Knives Out on a boat? Yes please!

Thankfully, The Restless Truth lived up to my - admittedly high - expectations. If I'm being honest, I actually enjoyed it a smidgeon more than the first one.

This time, we follow Robin's sister, Maud. I enjoyed the glimpses we had of Maud in A Marvellous Light and was excited to see more of her here. She's a young woman trying to make sense of her place in the world and who she is.

I also really liked her love interest, Violet. In many ways, she's unlike Maud. She's flippant, bold, and unfussed by scandal, but with a softer side as we get to know her. I also found myself really rooting for their romance.

Mostly, this was such a fun roller coaster of a book! There's a mystery, trouble, and a sapphic romance! There's magic, a disrespectful parrot, and a menegerie of animals on a ship! Honestly, what's not to love?

I received a free copy from Netgalley in return for a honest review.

A kind thank you to the publisher for the e-ARC.

I adored the first book of the series, A Marvellous Light. I loved Robin, Edwin, the original and fresh magic system using cradles, the adventurous and lush prose yet not overly done, and of course, the beautiful love story of Robin and Edwin. When I saw that the second book would center on a different couple, I got little scared and unsure because I loved Robin and Edwin so much. However, A Restless Truth was a magnificent story that exceeded all my expectations. The author delivered a beautiful, steamy love story marked by sapphic pining, murder investigation, and an exchange of deeply layered and emotionally devastating truths.

Maud is the kind of person who pushes forward for her beliefs and for the sake of others. She wants to make Robin proud, but she also just genuinely wants the best for people. She underestimates herself a little, but at the same time, she has a distinct sense of self-awareness. I loved that Maud has such a good influence on other characters without making her dull. It only made her more interesting.

Violet comes with baggage and emotional wounds that she masks in her smiles and smirks, and her lovely array of scandals. What I found so refreshing about Violet is that we finally got a love interest who is mysterious but not a jerk. I loved Violet, and how her love for Maud cracked her carefully built shell scene by scene. She was enthralling and an interesting main character who lived her life with a freedom that I both admire and envy.

I absolutely loved their story and their dynamics. I loved how they pushed each other, how they understood each other, and how they let the other in without changing who they are. Maud and Violet found themselves and each other on Lyric, and their journey was as romantic as it was steamy. This is definitely one of my favorite and one of the best written f/f relationships I've ever seen across all genres and age groups.

The murder investigation aspect of the book was also done very well. The pacing was good, and it gave us room to breathe and enjoy the radiant character relationships, without taking the mystery sparkles off the table. I also loved how the author connected the first book to the second, and how she set the table for the plot to be unraveled in the third book. This is a very well thought out series. A Restless Truth reads like an exciting, enthralling fantasy adventure with murder, love, and humor, and I found the combination of those elements was MAGIC. A Restless Truth couldn't have been any better.

Lastly, if the third book isn't centered on Lord Hawthorn, I'm going to scream!

A Restless Truth made me love this series even more, and I didn't know that was possible because I had fallen in love with Robin and Edwin from the first page of A Marvellous Light. (Their cameo at the very end made me squeal in delight! They're so swoon-worthy!)

A Restless Truth gave us an unforgettable sapphic pining-turned-mutual understanding-turned-love and a fantastic murder mystery with hints of magic, set on a beautiful, lush, humorous prose, and I loved everything about it. Book 3 when?!

I really enjoyed this sequel to A Marvellous light, Although well linked to the previous story, it felt like reading a whole new book as it featured different characters and a new setting. I loved the themes it touched upon and the murder-mystery-magic writing ☺️

I was nervous about this sequel because I adored A Marvellous Light but wasn’t a huge fan of Maud, so I was unsure about her being the new MC. However, I absolutely adored A Restless Truth.

I loved Maud and her ragtag band of misfits. I’m sure I’ve seen this advertised as ‘queer Knives Out on a boat’ and I can’t help but thoroughly agree.
A Restless Truth made me laugh watching Maud and her friends bumble their way through discovering the second piece of the last contract, however I also really adored Maud’s journey of self-discovery and acceptance.

I can’t wait to see how this all comes together in the final book of The Last Binding trilogy! Hopefully we’ll see Maud, Violet, Robin, and Edwin’s stories come together in book 3.

*I received an ARC of A Restless Truth from Netgalley, with thanks to the publisher. This review contains spoilers for the first book in the trilogy, A Marvellous Light. In my opinion, it cannot be read as a standalone.

Freya Marske’s debut, A Marvellous Light, was one of my favourite books of last year and so I clutched my ARC of A Restless Truth to my chest (literally, figuratively) with glee and trepidation. Sequels are tricky creatures; the middle books of trilogies are even trickier. This one takes Maud Blyth, a character I was less-than-enamoured by in the first book, as its protagonist and puts her on a quest, on a ship, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Could it possibly live up to my expectations of prose and plot and plant Maud in my heart? Yes, yes, and yes, with added vigorous nodding. I loved this book. I LOVED IT. It’s the reverse-heist fantasy ff romance of dreams that I didn’t know I had, and it made me incredibly happy. It is also beautifully, gorgeously written. At sentence level and in aggregate, Marske has a facility with words that Blows Me Away. I set a highlighting record and spent ages dwelling on individual lines and passages, even as I was ripping through the hijinks plot.

At the end of A Marvellous Light, Edwin Courcey and Robin Blyth gave up their piece of the Last Contract – the physical embodiment of an agreement made between English magicians and the fae – to the nefarious forces seeking to use it for their own ends, in order to fight another day. Now they are desperately looking for the other two pieces, each held by a member of the Forsythia Society, a group of experimental women magicians who swore to protect it. Robin’s younger sister Maud, after much special pleading, was sent to America to bring home one of those women, Beth Navenby. A Restless Truth opens with Mrs Navenby and Maud – travelling under an assumed name – on a ship back to England, bringing her piece of the Contract home for safe keeping. But Maud is not the only Contract seeker aboard and when Mrs Navenby is killed in a magical attack, and every item of silver in her cabin stolen, Maud is thrust into a dangerous race to retrieve the piece of the Contract before they make landfall. If only she knew what it looked like…

Determined and indomitable, Maud recruits the help of three fellow passengers: Violet Debenham, an heiress to a magical English fortune turned American stage performer; Lord Hawthorn, a magician who has lost his magic (and who we met briefly and deliciously in AML) and Alan Ross, a journalist, pornographer and thief. Together they embark on a glorious reverse-heist, involving filthy-talking parrots and menageries, seances and disguises, near-death experiences and magic duels. It's a romp, basically. A sort-of locked room scenario that sees Freya Marske choreographs both a mystery plot and a romance plot between the upper decks and the hold of an Atlantic steamer. The duration of the voyage – the whole book takes place over just six days – adds temporal limits to the spatial dimensions of the story, compressing and intensifying the action. It’s a supreme feat of choreography to make enough space within this for the shenanigans of the plot and the development of the characters and their relationships. The former is wonderful, proper edge-of-your-seat stuff at times, but the latter is what gave me most joy.

When we first met Maud in AML she was a sometimes-petulant, often-frustrating nineteen year old, exerting her will for independence and freedom after the death of her narcissistic parents. I was unsure whether she was going to be able to carry her own book and convince me as a romantic protagonist – I doubted and underestimated Maud at the outset, just as much as everyone around her does. She’s perky, irrepressible, and naïve in ways that could be, should be, annoying – she can’t dissemble, refuses to lie, knows very little about the world, has no magic or special skills, but insists on plunging straight into danger without thinking first. She couldn’t be more different from laconic, uncaring Hawthorn or Violet, who has spent so long performing and dissembling that she no longer knows if there is a “real” person underneath. Nevertheless, Maud grows on you by increments – her absolute determination to do good and fulfil her promise to her brother broke down my defences. Charlotte (whose review of ART you should also read) pointed out to me that she’s like a knight on a quest for the grail: while she may appear the most simplistic figure in the picture, she’s its beating heart. Maud also undergoes one of the most satisfying sexual awakenings I’ve ever read, first acknowledging and them exploring her physical and emotional attraction to confident, sparkling Violet.

If Maud is the heart of the book, Violet is its blood and bones. She’s brave, playful, liberated, scandalous – or at least, that’s the character she plays to the world. Having fled her home and family in England to secure her freedom in America, she has lived a life of games and magic tricks and sex whenever and with whomever she pleases. Now 23, heading back to secure an inheritance she didn’t want or expect, she’s determined to hold on to that persona. However, no plan survives first contact with Maud. Like Hawthorn, like Ross, Violet falls gradually under Maud’s beguilement – the difference being that her falling takes place inside, as well as outside, the bedroom. The two explore each other with heat and tenderness, matching my expectations for sex scenes set by AML, and showing creativity that I don’t feel we get enough of in mainstream ff romance. The conflict that arises out of their different ways of relating to the world - one through constant theatre of the self; the other through relentless honesty – generates a satisfying low buzz of angst to mix into the tension those characteristics also bring to the plot. How does a woman who can’t lie fight and win against magical tricksters? How can a woman who can’t shed her masks or look her true self in the eye commit to a self-less quest?

I found the weaving of plot and theme ticklish, and the denouement deeply satisfying. We start to see the worldbuilding and theory of magic open up in A Restless Truth, from the confines of English society to a global perspective. Although this story is about the particularly English magic embodied by the Last Contract, it’s not the only magic available, even if some of the characters in this story hold to the imperial superiority of British principles, ideals and ways of thinking. There are hints of American adaptations – Violet has learnt to practice illusions using imbued rings rather than cradles – as well as other magics of song and dance. It’s briefly mentioned how slavery destroyed much of the magic traditions of Black Americans, for example, showing how different ways of knowing have been subject to violent suppression. We also learn more about how the women of the Forsythia Club have developed magics of their own, which are not constrained by the form and structure of the Assembly – magic that pushes back against patriarchal assumptions of what magic is and who should control it. We’re starting to see how what’s at stake here is epistemological as well as political and personal: the conspiracy to secure and use the Last Contract to enhance the power of white, patriarchal, cishet imperialists is about locking down understanding of the world as well as the power to control that world.

All of which creates a tense and powerful set up for the battles of the final book in the trilogy. I’m already fizzing with excitement about it, and not only because of the overall arc: we also got some delicious hints of a romance between Lord Hawthorn and Alan Ross in A Restless Truth that stood all my hairs on end with wanting. If Freya Marske can stick the landing, I think it is going to be extraordinary.

Thank you so much to Pan Macmillan and NetGalley for providing me with an e-arc to read and review.

A Restless Truth was my most anticipated release of the year and it met all my expectations and more 😍.

I LOVE MAUD. New favourite character right here. I really liked being inside Maud's head and genuinely felt like I knew her personally from right at the beginning of the book. I also loved Violet's character development throughout and she kept me constantly intrigued.

Marske is incredible at interweaving past and present events in a way that doesn't take away from the momentum of the plot. I was so interested by the history behind The Last Contract and the way this impacted characters in the present. I continue to be amazed with the magic system in this series and how magic differs from magician to magician.

Another aspect I loved was the top tier banter between the unexpected group that formed between Maud, Violet, Hawthorn and Ross. The sarcasm was so good and I laughed out loud in parts.

Overall I highly highly recommend to anyone who has read A Marvellous Light to pick the sequel up as soon as possible and to anyone who hasn't read it to add this series to your TBR list immediately. A Restless Truth was an enchanting, mysterious and thrilling sequel and I'm so excited for book 3.

The Restless Truth by Freya Marske.

Thank you Netgallery UK and Tor publishing for a ARC for an unbiased review.

I'm a sucker for historical style fiction. Especially if it is in the style of Georgette Heyer, because we were brought up with her books all around us.
I'm a sucker for LGBTQIA books, because my husband and myself are both LGBTQIA.
I'm a sucker for fantasy style books. Because  ..... you get the picture.
I also adored the first of these books, A Marvellous Light. So I was excited to read this and it didn't disappoint.

This is a different set of main characters, but still very much in the same World that A Marvellous Light was set.
Do you need to have read A Marvellous Light? I'd say you should, because even though this could stand alone, in my opinion you'd be missing out.
While, for example, Maud Blyth is a character we know from the 1st book, (as are others) some are new, but they make just as much of an impact.

This book has it all in spades. Fun, mystery, mayhem, and a Marvellous (ahem) sapphic love interest.
I adored Maud in this. How she came into her own was a joy to read.
The magic element was as engaging as the 1st book. The mystery perhaps marginally less so, but it didn't detract for me at all, because it had so much going for it.

This is a book where I'd not only recommend is read by others, I'd happily gift it! It deserves to be seen by as wide a readership as possible.

5/5 stars 🌟