The most interesting things in Maud Blyth's life have happened to her brother Robin, but she's ready to join any cause, especially if it involves magical secrets that may threaten the whole of the British Isles. Bound for New York on the R.M.S. Lyric, she's ready for an adventure.
What she actually finds is a dead body, a disrespectful parrot, and a beautiful stranger in Violet Debenham, who is everything—a magician, an actress, a scandal—Maud has been trained to fear and has learned to desire. Surrounded by the open sea and a ship full of loathsome, aristocratic suspects, they must solve a murder and untangle a conspiracy that began generations before them.
"A person is a theatre". Freya Marske's A Restless Truth is the delightful sequel to 2021's exhilarating A Marvellous Light. The author makes the daring decision to change the beloved protagonists from the previous novel, and write about the sister of one of them. The plot follows some time after what happened in the first novel, as the mystery gradually unfolds and our heroes try to find out the truth.
Maud is different than her brother; she'd headstrong and very stubborn, but she's been sheltered all her life. She finds her match in the older performer Violet, whose walls are high and impenetrable. Their short game of seduction - the book takes place over the course of a week - is thrilling, as the more experienced Violet shows Maud that women can be with other women and Maud is allowed to explore her own attraction. Like the previous book, this one is definitely on the spicy side, with a few descriptive sex scenes that range from tender to intense. Maud and Violet grow to have a complex and nuanced relationship as they navigate their respective boundaries and their places in life.
The action unfolds in a single setting, the ship crossing the Atlantic. This allows for a sharper focus and a smidge of claustrophobia, which works well for the unfolding of a mystery, but also doesn't help relate to the characters as we have so little time to watch them interact. In contrast, the previous book excelled in showing the slow dismantling of the characters' walls together with the unfurling of the central mystery. The first book also had more worldbuilding, whereas here we don't discover much more of the bigger world, although we see some tantalising details of how other countries' magic works. English magicians use a complex series of hand gestures that remind me of Lev Grossman's The Magicians novels.
The supporting cast steals the scene sometimes. We meet again Lord Hawthorn, who had an unfortunate introduction in the first novel, and a delightful new character, Ross. The other passengers of the ship are a wild variety of characters, and it's fun to slip into the whudunit game together with the protagonists. There's daring action and investigations and misunderstandings aplenty, making this a solid sequel and a much-needed middle-book as it sets the stage for the final book of the trilogy, which will feature other two characters.
A Restless Truth is an incredibly fun read with a lavish prose that feels like an embrace.
✨ 4 stars
No comments:
Post a Comment