Marvellous Light

So good! The basic premise is that magic exists but is secret, and a non-magician in Edwardian England (probably sometime between 1908 and 1914) accidentally gets appointed to the government office that's meant for someone part of that world; he's immediately plunged into a deadly conflict he knows nothing about, with only his prickly magical liaison for help.

The deuteragonists are Robin, a baronet who nevertheless needs to work at a ministry post to support himself and his younger sister, and Edwin, the younger son of a magical family who nevertheless has very little ability to do magic himself. They're very much foils, with Robin having a certain amount of self-assurance and Edwin being used to his role as family buttmonkey (not a quote from the book), and it's quite satisfying to watch them each find out that the other is gay and slowly initiate a relationship; of course there's a separation in the last third, but we need one in order to have a reconciliation. This is very definitely coming out of the slash tradition, and I love it. Fandom is frankly better at writing nuanced and indulgent romance than non-fandom.

The non-romance part of the plot is a bit less compelling to me. The business that Robin gets dropped into is that someone is searching for a macguffin they think Robin knows about, and they half kill him trying to get it; the identity of the guy in charge is kept hidden until close to the end, but I realized who he was relatively quickly, because Edwin's older brother was set up as the monster of his childhood but never really appeared on the page apart from one brief dinner. This macguffin is also part of a plot that will let the baddies take over all English magic, which is perfectly fine in and of itself, but is it just me or does this kind of fantasy-historical story always involve someone trying to magically take over the country?

The other characters are pretty well-drawn. The second tier of characters is largely female, and while they lean a little toward being Awesome Ladies, they're not too much so. Said ladies are Maud, Robin's younger sister, who wants to go to university but it's never quite clear to me why; Miss Morrisey, his secretary, who is half-Indian and extremely competent at her job; and Mrs. Sutton, an elderly magician with an intriguing estate built on ley lines. Maud is the heroine of the sequel, which promises to be an f/f romance so I am looking forward to that - and I'm hoping that she'll feel a bit less like a "headstrong chit from the schoolroom" stock character when we get to inhabit her head.