★★★☆☆ I skimmed the "sexy bits"

A Power Unbound

Freya Marske

I picked up Freya Marske's Last Binding trilogy because it was nominated for a Best Series Hugo in 2024. It would not get my vote. I am not a big fan of romance, and am even less a fan of erotica. A Marvellous Light contains this acknowledgement

And a special shout-out to my mother, who was the first person to tell me that she couldn’t put this book down, and who forgave me for making her read the sexy bits.

There are indeed sexy bits in all three novels, and they are explicit and LONG. That was even more true in this, the final novel, because the erotica plays a part in the plot. One of the romantic partners, Alan Ross, is a writer of erotica (although he scorns such euphemism -- he just calls it "pornography"), and the other, Jack Alston, Lord Hawthorn, is one of his readers. I have nothing against erotica in principle, but it is just not what I'm looking for in my reading. I feel about it much the way I imagine Marske's mother does -- as something to get through. Thus I found myself skimming the sexy bits. I'd have been happy to skip them entirely, but they're not signposted in such a way as to make that easy, and every now and then a plot detail appears in one of them.

The actual fantasy plot, as opposed to the romance plot, I liked a lot. It reminded me of The Lord of the Rings, in that there is a MacGuffin with magical powers made by the fae, and its banishment requires the cooperation of a Gandalf (i.e., a very magical person) and a Frodo (a naive, non-magical person) to take care of it. The story was suitably twisty and clever and fairly exciting. I can see why it got the Hugo nomination.

Amazon review

Goodreads review

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