Once more, I’m rereading and re-rereading all of Seanan McGuire’s October Daye books, looking for all the subtle clues and, what seemed at the time, throwaway asides that should have told me what was coming in the sixth installment. Because once more, everything I thought I knew about the world and characters McGuire created just got blown to bits.
Rosemary and Rue opens with moody, Fae changeling October “Toby” Daye readjusting to living life in the human world after spending twelve years as a fish. She brings the skills she learned as P.I. in the mortal world across the border to Faerie as she searches for murders of one of the ruling Firstborn. Failure is not an option…Toby must solve the case or die.
A Local Habitation finds Toby officially back on speaking (even if only sarcastically) terms with Faerie, and she is ordered to a different duchy to solve a series of unusual murders. And the murders aren’t the only thing that’s unusual. This book required me to learn a new word: cyberdryad. Yes, you need to read these books.
These first two books are the bone and sinew of the series where Ms. McGuire takes the time to explain the rules of a parallel Faerie world, their relationship with our “real world”, the half human, half Fae mixed bloods called changelings, and the various types of creatures that the Faerie world harbors. While Ms. McGuire’s books all can stand alone, Rosemary and Rue offers a stable foundation for readers to build on as they delve deeper into the life and world of October Daye.
Each new book has managed to escalate both the peril and the price of Toby’s adventures. I assumed that the plots of any successive books would fall short of Toby’s collision with Blind Michael in An Artificial Night. While the line “Just once, I want to meet the villain in a cheerful, brightly lit room. Possibly one with kittens.” makes it unlikely this book will budge from its place as my favorite, I was wrong about it being the best the series would have to offer. Late Eclipses set the stakes and the standards even higher. One Salt Sea waved at it as it went by, placing the bar even higher and giving Toby’s new abilities a chance to shine, even as the past took center stage. And now Ashes of Honor has swept in and placed the entire realm of Faerie in peril. I’d like to say that the stage for the rest of series has been set and can’t get any larger…but quite frankly, at this point I’m half expecting a realm of Faerie to have colonized the moon, and Toby and Quentin to ride there on a speed boat enchanted by the Luidaeg to find Oberon and Titania. At this point, compared to everything else Ms. McGuire has convinced me is plausible, it's not out of the question.
What really sets this series apart though isn’t the high stakes adventures, but the deeply really and completely relatable characters. There are no two dimensional characters wandering on to deliver their one line in these books. Even if fifty characters end up being named in the story, I never start flipping back to remember who they are and why they are important. When a character featured in the second book reappears in the sixth, there is no confusion. And Ms. McGuire’s ability to weave words leaves no doubt that there is magic in this world.
However, cussing, murder, gore, violence, casual relationships, and alternative lifestyles make this definite eighteen and older series…probably an R one at that. Certainly, a movie that stayed true to the books would earn that rating. However, the style the books are written in moves quickly and doesn’t dwell on anything so that the books feel much more P-13.
The October Daye series includes:
Rosemary and Rue
A Local Habitation
An Artificial Night
Late Eclipses
One Salt Sea
Ash of Honor
Also by Seanan McGuire:
Discount Armageddon
And under the pen name Mira Grant:
Feed
Deadline
Blackout