Ah, the continuing saga of Toby Daye getting kicked in the teeth. After the events of last book, Toby now has to deal with her friends being poisoned, her death getting ever closer, the Luidheag not talking to her, four of five people who just need a fresh one across the face, and the possibility she’s slowly going insane; just another day in San Francisco.
Rereading the series, I’ve started noticing how many books have Toby behind the eight ball for most of the plot. In this one she’s poisoned, imprisoned, banned from Shadowed Hills, sentenced to death, near death, doubted by a large amount of her allies, starting a relationship with Connor (sorry not sorry; so not a fan of that particular ship); life is not going well for her. This book really picks up the slide into Luna being what Luna becomes, starts to truly show how mentally unstable Rayseline and Sylvester are, what a royal bit-, real pain in the , real charming person Amandine is. There are upsides to this book; Tybalt and Quentin continue to make appearances and they are as great as ever, Walter shows up finally, we get our first sighting of Jazz, more May, and Toby finally starts the journey to discovering where exactly she and her family fit into the larger picture of Faerie. And may I say, I would kill to have one of her Aunts (actually possibly two, but the other doesn’t make an appearance until several books from now). I had to laugh in foresight when Toby calls searching for the missing Three Creators of Faerie “a quest for some other idiot.”
Seanan McGuire continues to be one of my favorite fantasy novelists; even if the book isn’t my absolute favorite, the plot is gripping, the writing is impeccable, and the lines are quotable as ever.
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Etienne gave me lessons. Three of them. Then he said I was a menace and refused to teach me anything more for fear that I’d slice his head off.
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What’s the point of holding on if I can’t save the ones that I can’t afford to lose?
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Better cranky and alive than cheerful and dead.
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I wasn’t sure whether I was overreacting, underreacting, or doing both at once.
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Raysel, you told me yourself that your father wasn’t my liege anymore. I don’t have to obey his wishes, spoken or unspoken, and so I can finally say this: go drown yourself, you self-righteous little b**ch.
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She said she’d been in relationships with way bigger problems than one of us being a transitory manifestation of impending doom. Like this one girl who liked her computer more than she liked her girlfriend, and another one who smoked.
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Herding the fae really is a lot like herding cats, only pointier and less rewarding.
- I’ve never been a good cook – my ex-fiance once compared my meatloaf to roadkill – but I used to make more of an effort. Then my liege lord asked me for a “little favor” and I wound up spending fourteen years as an enchanted fish. It was difficult to work up any enthusiasm about learning to make a casserole after that.
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In the end there’s never a sanctuary. You run until there’s nowhere left to run to, and then you fight, and then you die, and then it’s over. That’s how the world works, and if there’s any way to change that, I hope someone’s eventually planning to let me know.
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You can live your life in “should” and never change anything.
- Okay, my life makes even less sense when you understand it. Whose doesn’t?
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No matter how bad the world gets, you still have to feed the cats.
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He was a hero once, and it’s the nature of heroes to throw themselves headlong into impossible odds, believing that somehow they’ll come through them alive. The problem is that it’s also in the nature of heroes to die, and I had no way of being sure that Sylvester didn’t plan to do exactly that. I should know how heroes are. Somewhere along the way, I became one.
I definitely recommend this series, and can’t wait to start One Salt Sea, the next one up, because I know it only goes into an even crazier roller coaster from there.