white_hart

I keep meaning to read more K.J. Charles, and have been gradually accumulated kindle copies of her books for w while waiting for the right time to read them. Bizarrely, I turned out to own not one but two kindle copies of The Magpie Lord*, as I discovered when I accidentally opened the series while scrolling through the library listing the other day and decided that was a sign that it was now the right time to read it.

The Magpie Lord is a Victorian Gothic fantasy with an m/m romance between Lucien Vaudrey, who has unexpectedly inherited a title which appears to come with a curse, and Stephen Day, the magician he employs to try to lift the curse. It's extremely funny in places, with some interesting magical worldbuilding and an enjoyably twisty fantasy mystery plot which zipped along and had real tension and a sense of peril without ever feeling too dark. I did feel that the romance subplot wasn't quite for me - I absolutely shipped Lucien and Stephen, but as portrayed in the book their attraction is all about lust and not at all about emotions, and the relationship develops entirely through explicit sex scenes which, despite explicit and enthusiastic consent on both sides, had a power dynamic that I found rather unsettling. This is very much a me thing, rather than a flaw in the book - I liked it a lot, and have bought the second and third books in the trilogy now.

*Though at least checking back I see that one of them was acquired when it was free for a limited period.