Simon reviewed A Restless Truth by Freya Marske (The Last Binding, #2)
Review of 'A Restless Truth' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
This second instalment is quite different to the first. The author acknowledges this in her afterword, thanking her editor for "letting me follow an English manor house book about vulnerability and wallpaper with a bubbly Wodehousian romp". That's perhaps a slight exaggeration, but it does have a less cautious and slightly less realistic feel to things, while maintaining the really nice magic system, and most of the quality of characterisation of the first book. The characters here do feel like they have less time/space to be developed here, but perhaps that fits with the time that they have to understand each other, given that the whole story happens over just a few days. It certainly avoids the first book's slow pacing at the start.
It feels as though if you took A Marvellous Light and mixed in a little bit of the Parasol Protectorate series, this might be the result. …
This second instalment is quite different to the first. The author acknowledges this in her afterword, thanking her editor for "letting me follow an English manor house book about vulnerability and wallpaper with a bubbly Wodehousian romp". That's perhaps a slight exaggeration, but it does have a less cautious and slightly less realistic feel to things, while maintaining the really nice magic system, and most of the quality of characterisation of the first book. The characters here do feel like they have less time/space to be developed here, but perhaps that fits with the time that they have to understand each other, given that the whole story happens over just a few days. It certainly avoids the first book's slow pacing at the start.
It feels as though if you took A Marvellous Light and mixed in a little bit of the Parasol Protectorate series, this might be the result.
Thoroughly enjoyed, in a different way to the first one.