It has been a long while since I read the first two books in Freya Marske’s Last Binding Trilogy, which may account for some of my complaints about A Power Unbound. I remember Adelaide being a part of the first but not the second story, and when she comes back in the third, I couldn’t remember much about her personality or backstory-wise. As a result, her parts (small but in one or two spots, important) felt underdeveloped and like I was missing something. She’s a good character, and she gets an ending she likes, but why she wanted things to be like that feels rushed without what I’m guessing is previously mentioned knowledge of her. I found a similar problem with Edwin; he’s got some pretty important parts, especially in the final great confrontation, but without the background from the first novel, the rationale behind his involvement makes less clear sense than I’d like. He’s almost just a one-note academic nerd here. Maud is reduced to a vaguely annoying presence with little purpose other than allowing for ghosts to provide important information through her medium capacity. Robin is there most of the time but not really; he’s present but no real personality or development.
In a lot of ways, this is mostly Violet’s and Jack Alston’s (Lord Hawthorne) story. Violet has to figure out her newly inherited magical house, in part because it might contain the final magical item the group needs to prevent the bad guys from doing bad things to magic with a trio of powerful objects. Jack got roped into helping with the save the magical world project in the previous novel, and it’s his turn for the romance. We get a good bit of his family backstory which has been mentioned before but now plays a more significant role in the story; I have no problems with these parts. They are interesting and add to both the character and the story. I’m not a huge fan of him and Alan as a couple though; it’s clearly an enemies to lovers dynamic, but it’s got an edge that I don’t like. The two of them never really seem to get over their political/class/traumatic backstories to the point where it never feels like they’re actually falling in love with some genuine growing attachment and understanding for each other as opposed to nearly reluctant lusting. To be fair, there’s a realism to their dynamic, both in public and private, since neither one is likely going to fully grasp the other’s class-based world-views in the short period of their romance story, which is about the second half of the novel.
The emphasis on magic lore is probably the best part of the story with the introduction of magic houses that are practically sentient and the nod to the importance of the household bees. The revealed source of magic that is endangered for most of the story similarly works well in the background of general English magic lore, although the difference between the two parts of the types of magic that get brought up towards the end is not clearly explained. A little more detail there would have been nice, since the conclusion seems to happen pretty abruptly. I still don’t quite get how the party that gets to the “knife” object first does so; there’s a suggestion so I can guess, but I’d have liked confirmation since it really would have made the whole confrontation between the good guys and bad guys make more sense. It’s possible I did miss something since I had to rush reading the last third or so; the book was due back to the library and there’s no renewals for recent releases like this.
Again, it’s possible that my issues here come from not remembering something from the first two episodes, or from rushing the final 60 pages or so. That said, it’s a decent ending to the trilogy, with the important things settled but others left kind of open.