Late Eclipses

After finishing An Artificial Night, I decided to jump straight into the next October Daye book, Late Eclipses.  This time around, Toby is summoned to the court of the Queen of the Mists.  After some vague warnings from Tybalt, Toby finds herself given the title of Countess of Wintergreen.  She knows it's a trap though: changlings never get titles.  But at this point there's no indication of just what the Queen is up to.

Toby's immediately pulled away to the Tea Gardens, to find something equally unsettling: Lily is sick.  As an undine and pureblood, Lily should not be able to get sick.  Toby vows to get to the bottom of it.  But before she can do much investigating, she has to make an appearance at the Torquill's Beltane Ball.  Only while there, she is the only witness to Luna fainting, possibly from being poisoned from wine.  Toby got a whiff of Oleander de Merelands' magic - Oleander is one of the ones who were responsible for turning Toby into a fish for fourteen years.  Oleander is also an assassin extraordinaire, whose weapon of choice is poisons.  But there's one problem: every time Toby seems to believe Oleander is around, no one else can see her.  Is Toby's changeling blood finally making her go mad?  Or is there a sinister plot afoot that she's tangled up in?  

I was quite interested in the story up to about this point (and was even thinking of ordering the next two books in the series because I was having so much fun with it).  But then things started to take a rather...dare I say: familiar...turn.  Rayseline, Sylvester's daughter, hates Toby.  When Luna is incapacitated, and Sylvester turns mad with grief, Raysel uses the opportunity to take control of the Knowe, naming herself in charge.  She banishes Toby, and starts spreading rumours that Toby is the one who hurt Lily and Luna.  After Lily dies, Toby returns to the Knowe, but Raysel uses it as a chance to have her arrested.  You see, having been named Countess, Toby is now no longer under Sylvester's protection, but the Queen's.  And the Queen orders her to stand trial, a sham used to convict Toby and sentence her to execution.  She's locked in an iron dungeon for a few days; her friends break her out and bring her back from the brink of death by iron poisoning.  But Toby cannot stand idly by, and insists on returning to Sylvester's Knowe in an attempt to save Luna.

While the plot trappings are different, the second half of the story was, in many ways, a repeat of An Artificial Night, and how Toby kept charging back into Blind Michael's lands.  She was even held prisoner and poisoned (although it was more a mental poisoning rather than the iron poisoning she suffered here).  But even after all that, she had to charge back into danger after barely healing to see it through.  There's nothing necessarily wrong with this plot on its own merits, but reading it right after An Artificial Night got very, very boring.

Now sure, there was some interesting things going on too. Toby got shot with Elfshot, which is deadly to Changlings.  Her mother mysterious showed up and changed her, making her far more fae.  This saved her life, but also means that iron is now a problem when it wasn't before (the change happened just before she was sentenced and thrown into the iron jail).  Her features even changed, becoming more fae.  

Another thing that was interesting (though sad) was Lily's death.  Lily's subjects were able to mourn, but Toby never was (she was just a crazy exhausted mess running from one fire to the next trying to put them all out).  I would have loved if the book slowed down a bit to deal with (and really show) some of this stuff.  But Toby herself even says that there's no time to deal with it now.

I'm also a fan of the relationship she's developing with Tybalt.  Somewhere along the lines she's started trusting him.  And while he's still very aloof, you can tell he cares for her.  That's all going to get complicated in the coming books because Connor, her one-time crush and Rayseline's husband, is freed from the marriage at the end of the book (Raysel did some unforgivable things, and his Selkie clan dissolved their political marriage immediately).

So all in all, this ended up just an okay read.  I do wish I had waited awhile before reading it, rather than starting it immediately after An Artificial Night.  But thanks to all the repetition in the plot, I'm done with the series for now - if I go back to it, it won't be for a long while.

An Artificial Night

I finally got around to reading An Artificial Night, the third book in Seanan McGuire's October Daye series.  I've been looking forward to it since reading A Local Habitation (and hearing it was much better than that book was)...it just took me a few years to actually get around to reading it.  :/

This time around, Toby starts off by having a really bad day - her Fetch arrives, which means that Toby's death is immanent.  That's followed by frantic calls from one of her best friends, Stacy, because two of Stacy's five children are missing and one is now in an un-wakeable slumber.   Toby goes to investigate, finding clues but nothing definite that points to what happened to the children.  With Stacy's permission, she brings the slumbering Karen to Lily's Tea Gardens in the hope that the undine can wake her.  Along the way, Tybalt finds her and asks for her help, because several of the children from his Court of Cats have gone missing as well.  Though a great healer, Lily is unable to help Karen.  But she sends Toby to "speak to the moon" - which brings her to Luna, Sylvester's wife.  While figuring out that riddle, she finds Quentin at her place - his human girlfriend has gone missing as well.  

Luna is the one who fills in the missing pieces.  The culprit is Blind Michael, one of the Firstborn Fae, and master of the Hunt.  No one would ever willingly join him and his hunt, so every hundred years he takes the unwilling: the children.  He takes faerie children to be his riders, and human children to be their steeds.  He twists them all and binds them to himself.  And he has taken all of the missing children that Toby is looking for.

To find him, Toby needs the help of the Luidaeg, the Firstborn Seawitch.  The Luidaeg can send Toby to Blind Michael's realm on one of the few roads that are open.  First Toby takes the Child's Road, which involves Toby being transformed into a child.  She manages to bargain with Blind Michael for the children - if she's able to get them out undetected, she can take them home.  But Toby takes more children than were bargained for, and so the Hunt pursues her outside of Blind Michael's realm.  Next she takes the Rose Road, care of Luna, to try to stop the Hunt from pursuing her (and to save Karen, whose soul was taken by Blind Michael while she slept).  Blind Michael agrees only if Toby stays in Karen's place.  He begins to bind Toby to him, but before the final binding can finish, Toby's friends manage to save her (along with some of the other children who were taken).  But Blind Michael has already done some major damage to Toby's mind, and she is determined to end things with him.  Which leads her back using the final road, the Blood Road, which demands a tithe be paid in blood, either Toby's or Blind Michael's.

I wish I had read An Artificial Night a bit closer to A Local Habitation.  It's been a few years, and I forgot who many of the characters were (like Quentin).  Yes, the book kind of explained things well enough so I could follow it alright, but it would have been a lot nicer had I actually remembered people!  But I did enjoy An Artificial Night.  It was a really interesting story and I didn't want to put it down (I read almost the entire book yesterday afternoon).  My biggest complaint (other than some weird things that were repetitive and should have been caught in editing, like how the book explained who Lily was both times Toby went to the Tea Gardens in almost exactly the same words) was that it wasn't scary enough.  When a story is dealing with childhood bogeymen and the main character gets turned into a child, that's a story that's ripe for some creepiness and (childhood) horror!  Unfortunately I just never felt that during the book - Toby went on treating everything kind of just like business as usual.  

Other than that though, I really enjoyed An Artificial Night.  I'm looking forward to reading the next book in the series, Late Eclipses (and without letting several years pass before I pick it up!)

A Local Habitation

So I seem to be on an urban fantasy kick lately.  I recently ordered some stuff for my cat from Amazon.  To get the free shipping, I decided to get myself the second October Daye book, A Local Habitation.  I was going to read it over the weekend, but decided to get through Hunting Ground first.  Once that was done, I jumped into the second Toby Daye adventure.

This time around, Toby is asked by her liege, Sylvester, to investigate his niece's County.  His niece, January, stopped calling him a few weeks ago.  For faerie political reasons, he cannot go himself.  So he sends Toby and Quentin, a pureblood who is fostering at his court, to investigate.

Toby and Quentin arrive to discover there have been several murders in the County, and January insists that she has been leaving Sylvester messages but HE hasn't been returning her calls.  When another person from the County is murdered, Toby and Quentin realize they may be in over their heads.  The murders are odd for many reasons - there are distinctive markings on the victims, their blood is dead (there is no memory left when Toby and Quentin both try to use the blood magic that is inherent to their bloodline), and the night haunts haven't been taking the bodies (usually these fae creatures take the bodies and leave a sort of mannequin that looks human behind, so normally the fae can call in mortals to investigate the death without fear of the bodies giving them away.  Not so in this case). Then when Toby tries to get Quentin out of there, his escort arrives without a car, right after Toby's car is totaled. The County is also a strange place - there is a dryad living in the tech tree, and no one seems to be telling Toby and Quentin everything they know, making it really hard for them to do their job.  

A Local Habitation was a bit of a mess.  The characters seemed to go out of their way to get murdered.  Toby repeatedly told the people of the County not to go off alone, then pretty much EVERYONE did.  Spoiler: most of them got killed for their troubles.

There were also two characters, brother and sister pair Alex and Terrie, who seemed obviously to be two people in one body.  Alex was only around during the day, and Terrie during night.  You never, ever saw the pair together.  But Toby never remotely figured this out - she had to be shown it near the end of the book.  They also seemed to be some sort of succubus/incubus thing, inspiring the opposite sex to love them; Toby sort of clued into that part way through the book, but still couldn't figure out what they were.  It was lame.

Overall, A Local Habitation was just okay.  I enjoyed it well enough, but wouldn't recommend it to anyone because it isn't great.  I've seen in other reviews on Goodreads that that seems to be the consensus - A Local Habitation is everyone's least favourite book in the series.  But book three is supposed to be phenomenal, so I'll be looking for that in the future.

Rosemary and Rue

I heard Seanan McGuire speak at 4th Street Fantasy several years ago.  I looked up her books afterwards and they sounded interesting, so I grabbed Rosemary and Rue, the first book in her October Daye series.  I finally got around to reading it now.

Rosemary and Rue opens with this really intriguing prologue.  October "Toby" Daye is a private investigator who just happens to be a changeling (a half human-half faerie).  She's tailing her only suspect in a kidnapping case (the wife and daughter of her liege lord and friend have disappeared).  The suspect (her liege's brother) gets the better of her and turns her into a koi fish.The prologue ends with Toby saying that the koi pond "was my home now, the only one I'd know for fourteen years."

So that was a pretty cool hook.  Unfortunately, chapter one opens with Toby working at a grocery store fourteen years and six months later; the curse had been broken somehow six months earlier, and she was trying to put her life together.  Her husband and daughter wanted nothing to do with her (they believe she left them fourteen years ago).  And Toby wants nothing to do with the faerie world because it caused all of this.

I say this is unfortunate because I thought it would be fun to see what happened - how the curse was broken, who broke it, etc.  But nope.  Skip ahead.  McGuire gives details a bit later in the narrative, but it's not very satisfying.

Anyway, a faerie noble, the Countess Evening Winterrose (who happens to be the only one Toby is really speaking to) is murdered.  Before the murder, Eve calls Toby and lays a binding on her, so that Toby must discover who the murderer was or else she will die.  This forces Toby back into the world and life she left behind. 

While Toby is much weaker than her mother, she inherited her mother's ability to taste blood and relive the blood's memories.  It's pretty neat.  She does this pretty early in the story (going to Eve's murder scene to learn what she can).  There's a part later in the story where Toby (and a couple of other changelings) is attacked and another fae, Tybalt, saves her.  Tybalt gets the attackers blood all over everything (including his shirt).  It was obvious to me that Toby could discover who had hired the attacker at that point.  And it was obvious to her too: she tried to tell Tybalt that, but he shooed her away (to be fair, she had almost died a couple of times - the attacker had shot her with iron, which had almost killed her.  Then the same attacker was waiting for her when she was leaving the Japanese Tea Gardens where her friend, Lily, had managed to heal her).  But then there was about 100 pages of Toby checking out random leads before FINALLY going and getting Tybalt's shirt to discovered who had hired the guy. 

Warning: Major Spoiler Ahead. 

The culprit was a bit surprising in some ways.  It was her changeling friend/old mentor Devin.  Devin had been friends with Eve, but she had a Hope Chest, which has the power to turn changelings into either full humans or full faerie, whatever they wish.  Devin wanted it to live forever.  So he killed Eve, and kept sending random people to go and kill (or torture then kill) Toby to stop her from getting the chest (or find out where she had hidden it).  The weird thing about him doing it is that he kept sending kids who had no idea about his plan to hang out with Toby.  Or like he would patch up Toby, then send a Doppelganger in to torture and kill her.  Or he called in a huge favour to heal her from iron poisoning, then turned around to murder her (this was really, really weird.  It would have made more sense if ANYONE else in the book had called in the favour instead).  These were really, really weird moments.  I guess he was wanting Toby to back off from the investigation and kept asking her to - it was only when she kept saying no that he'd send more things to murder her.  

Other than these plot issues (this and the weird prologue to chapter 1 time gap I mentioned earlier), I really enjoyed the book.  And to be fair, this was McGuire's very first novel.  So I would be interested in reading more from her (and more October Daye) in the future. :)