The Second Death of Locke
I really liked this book. The magic is interesting, the characters are
sympathetic and compelling, and the romance is sweet and sincere. I think the
third act lost me a little bit as action films sometimes do—I start to tune out
when the conflicts get larger and less personal—but it never zoomed too far
out, and I think it stuck the landing well-enough,
The book also does admirably at injecting a pretty familiar Arthurian fantasy setting with some subversion of the Anglo puritanism you might expect, and I think it did it very naturally, and in a number of ways that allowed characters to simply be rather than needing to provide some narrative purpose in their identity. Though it’s probably worth noting that the central protagonists are by all appearances cis and though the characters are bi, the central romance is straight. Which is of course OK! But it does then leave the trans and nonbinary characters, and queer stories, in the background.