Hello, lovely readers!

We’re back with our June pick for ILVN’s 2023 Reading Challenge!

This month is pride month, so we’ve chosen an LGBT+ book to celebrate and support our community. With the many suggestions my friends offered me, I’ve landed on A Marvellous Light by Freya Marske, which comes off as a Harry Potter-inspired world with magic and muggles, although not worded so, with mystery, curses, and a spicy m/m romance!

Yes, please.

Check out this description:

Red, White & Royal Blue meets Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell in debut author Freya Marske’s A Marvellous Light, featuring an Edwardian England full of magic, contracts, and conspiracies.

Robin Blyth has more than enough bother in his life. He’s struggling to be a good older brother, a responsible employer, and the harried baronet of a seat gutted by his late parents’ excesses. When an administrative mistake sees him named the civil service liaison to a hidden magical society, he discovers what’s been operating beneath the unextraordinary reality he’s always known.

Now Robin must contend with the beauty and danger of magic, an excruciating deadly curse, and the alarming visions of the future that come with it―not to mention Edwin Courcey, his cold and prickly counterpart in the magical bureaucracy, who clearly wishes Robin were anyone and anywhere else.

Robin’s predecessor has disappeared, and the mystery of what happened to him reveals unsettling truths about the very oldest stories they’ve been told about the land they live on and what binds it. Thrown together and facing unexpected dangers, Robin and Edwin discover a plot that threatens every magician in the British Isles―and a secret that more than one person has already died to keep.

I am excited to watch the tension build between Robin and Edwin, and to see how Marske remakes the magical elements as her own. Also, secretly, I’m imagining this as a Harry and Draco match. Let me know if you’re thinking the same thing.

Since I’ve already used up my magic prompt for May’s reading challenge pick, Ramses the Damned: The Reign of Osiris, I am struggling a bit to fit this one into the prompts I have left.

So, this might take a little logic and finagling. I’m thinking fated mates, although there isn’t anything to suggest that a higher power, or fate, has deemed these two to be together, I could make an argument for the way magic plays a role in kindling the romance between these two leading men and how their adventures together keep Edwin from erasing all knowledge of the magic in their world from Robin’s memory.

That’s fitting enough to fit the prompt. I really don’t want to make them too difficult to fulfill, so we’ve all accepted that loose train of logic, right?

Right.

Let’s fill in our fated mates graphic. I am ready for some spicy man-on-man action wrapped up in a whimsical and terrifying world of magic. Bring it on!

We hope you’ll be reading our choice for June with us and joining us for our live discussion on A Marvellous Light as our ILVN Book Club pick! Remember to set yourself a reminder for June 24th at 2pm CDT over on our Youtube channel. No worries, you can still join us via facebook to get there.

We’ll also have some live reading sprints in June over on Youtube, so keep an eye out for those! I look forward to chatting with you all!

Join our list for more information about the book club!

Tag us at @ILoveVampireNovels to share your pick for this month’s reading challenge.

Happy reading!