Look, I do feel a bit bad not following every bingo tile to the letter, but I have one that I am having difficulty filling, and I have not written a review for an October Day novel for nearly two years, so I think I can excuse myself.
First, a point of confusion: I had thought that the next book was going to be called These Violent Delights, and even stated as such in my last review. But as you can see from the title—Silver and Lead—something must have changed here, so I never got a google alert for the book’s impending publication date and nearly missed it.
But what hasn’t changed since the end of the last book and now is Toby’s condition; she is still eight months pregnant and has not quietly gone on maternity leave while we were waiting. I think this is primarily driven by the fact that Toby would probably go stir crazy if she were constrained any more than she needed to be. But also, I get the impression that fairy work culture does not really believe in the concept; the fae are so infrequently pregnant, after all.
Or maybe Arden is a bit of a shit.
Arden has been rubbing me the wrong way in her last few appearances. I know she doesn’t like the situation that she’s found herself in, and I know she’s probably trying to do the best she can with the shit that keeps on being flung her way, but she has not always been making the best choices. (I am still cross at her for her actions back in A Red-Rose Chain, by the way). I understand that she needs help, but isolating Toby from Tybalt to make a not-too reasonable request of her while she’s at the stage where she could go into contractions at any time? Honey, no. Please, put out a search—be it LinkedIn or the classifieds—for more heroes, please. Train up some knights. Something to spread the burden around.
So Toby has a task to do. When she should be at home, with her OB on speed-dial. Lovely.
To be slightly more fair to Arden though, the situation is not great; during the giant wopper of a spell that trapped people in an alternate reality for several months, someone got a little opportunistic and fleeced Muir Woods of many of its dangerous artifacts. Including a hope chest. And, as we all know, the False Queen was very interested in restoring her heritage—pity she seems to have disappeared from custody at some point as well. (Arden: tell your hiring committee you need more security guards).
To return to that wopper of a spell though: one of the more interesting parts of Silver and Lead involves non-Toby and Tybalt characters starting to discuss what happened to them when they were caught under the umbrella of the spell, and how that’s affected there relationships and their psyche. And there there are the people who were not be-spelled; a number of which who were suddenly cut off from all contact with Faerie for the months the spell was running. Maybe someone should have been checking in on them?
At the end of Sleep No More/The Innocent Sleep, I felt we had hit the end of at least one major story arc in this series. Without giving away too much here, I feel that we’re heading into a close to seamless transition into a new one. I have So Many Thoughts on that, by the way.
This was a very satisfying entry to the series, and I’m really excited to see what McGuire might be cooking up for book twenty. As a final note though, if you are squeamish—and if you’ve gotten this far into the series, you shouldn’t be—this is probably one of the most bloody entries in the series. Thankfully, the cute little novella at the end acts a nice palette cleanser. But yes, it gets gory.
For cbr17bingo, this is my Free Space, which I am plonking over Play. I guess if I had read Henry V rather than watching it at the Miller Theater a few weeks back, I would have had something to put here.
But the bard in these books seems to have taken inspiration from the fae, so close enough?