Protecting Cheesyfee a few more Goodreads reviews
5*
Talli...he breaks down crying and says Gwydion was his mate, one of his only real ones, because he's too weird for most people, and Gwydion was weirder. I laughed and then immediately felt awful about laughing. That's good writing. That small moment said more about both of them than pages of backstory would have.
5*
The scenes where Sorcha and Gwydion communicate telepathically while Branwen monitors the data are some of the most quietly intimate in the book. He tells Sorcha he's fallen in love and asks if that's permitted. She tells him Branwen loves him too. He says he thinks she loves him in spite of his magic, not because of it. Sorcha says that's not what she sees at all. There's so much gentleness in those exchanges. Sorcha is the person who sees him most clearly and she handles that responsibility beautifully.
5*
Gwydion rounds on her [Ganna]immediately. The conversation that follows is one of the most charged in the whole novel, old betrayals surfacing, accusations made carefully, Ganna unable to promise she won't be tempted and saying so out loud. It would have been easy to write her as simply loyal or simply treacherous. Instead she's a person genuinely wrestling with herself. "I don't know" is the most honest thing she could have said and somehow it's also the most reassuring.
5*
Nobody prepared me for Merlin being genuinely baffled by the Tube. Or spending hours watching Downton Abbey and Fringe back to back and not being able to tell them apart. Or Googling things with intense concentration like it's the most powerful magic he's ever encountered, because to him it basically is. The comedy of a 1500-year-old man discovering the internet is perfectly balanced against everything heavy in the book. He never becomes a joke. He's just a person encountering a world that moved on without him and trying to catch up.
5*
The romance between Branwen and Gwydion is the slowest of slow burns and I savored every page of it. No declarations. No grand gestures. Just two people gradually letting their guard down, sharing tea, going running, watching Shakespeare plays, having arguments and then sitting in silence afterward until someone says sorry. The night it finally shifts between them is so understated that you almost miss it. Almost. Then he quotes Shakespeare quietly in the dark and she kisses him and I had to close the book and breathe for a moment.
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