What I thought I was getting was fantasy adventure (magic in England in the ~1910s) with a romance subplot. What I got was the type of romance plot that doesn't appeal, with a varnish of fantasy adventure sub-subplot, and quite a lot of sex scenes. Maybe if I'd had the right expectations, I'd have appreciated this story more.

As it was, there are lots of interesting details, and there were some fabulous paragraphs. But I finished it somewhat out of spite, and because I have book two out of the library, waiting for me to read it. I did want to know what happened, but I didn't really want to have to deal with the romantic couple and their emotional miscommunications.

I can see that there are some interesting overarching plot threads, with three items to be found, and three books to find them in, so I have hopes that book two won't slump.

Overall summary: world building fantastic, plot a bit rough, characterisation a little off and occasionally veering towards farce, writing shows promise, particularly as this is a debut novel. ( )

This book started off with an interesting premise and some cool worldbuilding, but it failed to engage me. I was bored reading it, and never cared about the characters or romance. Overall, I would not recommend. ( )

Read it again after reading the second and honestly I loved it even more. Such a great book, moved it from 4 to 5 stars. ( )

I enjoyed reading this. Both the magical and the romantic parts are convincing, and the world and the secondary characters are believable and engaging. I’m looking forward to the next book in the series. ( )

I wanted to like A Marvellous Light much more than I did. I'd seen a lot of people recommend it, and a queer fantasy romance set in an Edwardian England where magic is real, if secret, should be the kind of thing I eat up. But while it's readable, and I even enjoyed stretches of it at a time, it lacked that ineffable spark a book needs to make it come alive for the reader. In fact, I'm not even convinced it had that for the author.

It's competently written, yes, but did Freya Marske herself actually have fun while writing it? It's all so serious, when a book like this—with curses! magical hedge mazes! country house parties where everyone dresses for dinner!—should just lean into the campy technicolour possibilities of it all. Equally, the female characters around the edges—as clichéd as they were—would probably have been a better place to begin the trilogy, given their second-class position in the magical social system that Marske sets up. It may well have given the book more tension, and encouraged Marske to bring in some more verisimilitude to the historical setting. (Why is this set in 1908, other than to have the shadow of WWI on the horizon? Because Marske doesn't seem particularly interested in the Edwardian period, and the dialogue, manners, etc, don't ring true. It might have worked better set in the '30s.)

Like I said, it's competent, and if I come across the sequel I wouldn't rule out giving it a try, but I don't think I'm going to rush out to look for it either. ( )