Night and Silence—Seanan McGuire

Night and Silence

Y’all, it’s release date, which means I am cutting it just past the wire as I finish this one. I was stoked to be approved for an ARC of Night and Silence, this twelfth book in the series, because I love it and I love Toby Daye as a character and because I love Seanan McGuire (who lives in Seattle!)

BUT the only downside is that I had to re-read all of the other books, and there are 11 of them (not including novellas or other stories) so it took a minute.

All that to say, I finally finished this one today. And whew was it worth all of the lead up and the wait. So many secrets revealed, so many new adventures primed.

First, a quick recap of where we’ve come from. October “Toby” Daye is a changeling—that is, the child of a fae parent and a human parent. A long time ago, she made the changeling choice and opted for the fae side of her, only unfortunately her fae mom was not really interested in being a mother to her. Toby is also a private detective in the Bay Area. In her first adventure, Toby is unceremoniously turned into a fish while pursuing her liege’s kidnapped wife and kid. Even more unfortunately, she stays a fish for 14 years. Bummmer. And then throughout the next books, she goes on many more, mostly life-threatening adventures, gathering friends and family and unveiling secrets along the way. McGuire infuses quite a lot of Shakespeare into this series: all of the titles of the books are taken from Shakespeare quotes, many of the characters have Shakespeare-inspired names, Toby herself is a big fan, and as fae are immortal, some of them were contemporaries of old Willy Shakes himself, so it all comes full circle.

I played a fun game while re-reading where I renamed all of the books as if they were Harry Potter books. Night and Silence I renamed “Toby Daye and the Old Home Week.”

One thing that is great for new readers: while you can (and in my opinion, absolutely should) start from the beginning, McGuire does a fairly good job of recapping essential information as she goes through the new books in the series, so although you of course won’t get the whole action of the previous books, you can get the gist and not be completely lost.

In Night and Silence, Toby’s estranged, college-age human daughter Gillian has been kidnapped, Toby’s pretty sure by somebody from faerie (so nothing she can explain to her ex and his new wife when they are curious about where the daughter might have gone), and Toby has to track her down. This isn’t the first time that Gillian has been kidnapped because of Toby, but it is a bit more dangerous this time around, for a number of reasons. Toby’s made quite a few enemies over the years, so the list of people who might want to punish or blackmail her by taking her daughter is pretty extensive.

I can’t really get into too many more details without giving bits away, and the bits are too good to give away. Boy are them some doozy secrets revealed in this one. It feels like a whole new beginning for Toby and a refresh for the series (not that it needs it). I have to admit, when I saw the synopsis for the book, I thought to myself, “Again? She gets kidnapped again?” Especially since some of the characters that pop up as villains once again are folks that we thought were vanquished. Are we never going to be able to trust that someone is dealt with and/or dead, for real? But all of those thoughts went out the window as the story went on, with ever-increasing stakes and a satisfying resolution that left me wanting to read the thirteenth book in the series immediately. (Alas.)

One of my absolute favourite things about this series is the family that McGuire has built around Toby. I think many of us can relate to the idea of our biological families not always being what we need them to be, and of constructing a chosen family around ourselves to fill the gaps. That’s truly what Toby has around her now, and they all grok her on such a deep level that it often brings tears to my eyes. The unspectacular way that McGuire has introduced such a diverse range of characters and experiences among the gang is aspirational. And I will always want to be a little bit like Toby: selfless and reliable to a fault, enormously gooey with a hard shell, and endlessly sarcastic. (I think I got that last one pretty well down, actually.)

I highly recommend this series if you are at all interested in faerie/fairy stories, or magic, or just generally awesome fantasy with spectacular and intricate worldbuilding. And if you like this series, Seanan McGuire has written other books under her name, as well as pseudonyms for other genres. They’re all stellar.

Lord of Secrets—Erica Ridley

Lord of Secrets Nora is a paid companion to her distant cousin Lady Roundtree, who has broken her leg. The only reason she took the position was to help support her younger brother and elderly grandparents in the country, where she usually lives. She’s not used to the way that things are done in society. She’s not great at reading and writing (she has dyslexia, though it’s never stated that way) and so she draws little caricatures of society gatherings for her family back home. Little does she know, her brother started selling them to a publication, albeit anonymously, and the society she has depicted in these caricatures is not thrilled to see their laundry aired. Heath, a member of that society, is also known as something of a fixer. He is hired to track down the identity of the caricaturist. But he didn’t expect to develop feelings for this new lower class girl and he definitely didn’t expect her to be the person behind the pen.

Whew. I really got on a tear of requesting romance books from NetGalley. Honestly, I was just looking for some escapism, and historical fiction romance usually is great at that. Not as much this time around.

This is number 5 in the Rogues to Riches series. I hadn’t read any of the others in the series, and the completionist in me is bummed by that, but the recoveringcompletionist in me is quite pleased with this indication of progress.

Overall, this book was meh for me. Not bad, not great, just kind of meh. Which, honestly, equates to a bit unforgettable in the long run.

I appreciated that Nora wasn’t a Mary Sue-style perfect heroine, though it did seem like the only thing keeping her from being that was this kind of shoehorned dyslexia. Now, I’m all for more characters in literature that have disabilities, but the fact that she had so much self-hatred about it (realistic for the time period but disappointing considering other “not realistic for the time period” moments) was not my favourite.

Although it was somewhat anachronistic or less prominent in history than it might seem from this novel, I loved how much Heath’s sisters took Fleetwood Mac’s advice to heart, and went their own ways. I know at least one of them is the subject of another book in the series, and I enjoyed the snippets that we got with his sisters so much that I’m actually interested in reading that book, even though this one was just whelming.

Alright, let’s get into the things I found less than stellar. Insta love x100000000. Of all the tropes, this is among my three least favourite. They met once at a dance, he was nice to her, and immediately she’s in love with him. As I noted on my Kindle, “Extreme, instant infatuation is a good start to every relationship.”

I noticed a theme that is prevalent in historical romance which has always bothered me but which I haven’t been able to hit on until this book. So often, the heroine is someone who shirks the expectations of society and does things differently, and that’s why the hero falls in love with her. BECAUSE she’s different. Which is basically just the old-timey version of “you’re not like other girls.” The heroes especially usually deride the other girls, the ones who are hunting for husbands. Like, what do you expect of them? They’ve been told their entire lives—by society, by their friends, by their families—that the entirety of their worth is wrapped up in who they are able to “catch” as a husband. You’re really going to be an asshole about a girl who does what she’s been told is the most important thing to do every day of her life? Ugh.

Honestly, the biggest obstacle to loving this book for me was that it seemed like nothing happened. The pacing was so terrible, and as a result, the passage of time was quite confusing. It almost felt like this had initially been planned as a novella and then had to be stretched into a novel-length piece. Not even character development was happening during that time, which might have been the only reason I would excuse such slow pacing. I got to 62% in, and made the note that it felt like nothing had happened. At 72% in, FINALLY a single kiss! Not another kiss until 90 PERCENT INTO THE BOOK. What even am I doing here?

As I mentioned, I would be interested in reading the final book in the series, Lord of Vice, which is about Heath’s sister Bryony and a gaming hell owner Max. They were both introduced in this book, and immediately, as soon as Max was introduced, I made a note that I was CERTAIN he was going to get with one of Heath’s sisters. And he does. I’m into it. I am a bit of a sucker for a rogue gaming hell owner story. There are surprisingly a lot of them.

More or Less a Countess—Anna Bradley

More or Less a Countess

“Violet didn’t mind the dark. She’d spent many evenings alone in her grandmother’s library, cradling dusty books in her hands and pondering the pattern of invisible fingerprints on those old, crackling pages.”

SAME, Violet.

Violet Somerset is an opinionated, odd girl who just wants to love books and also write one about true crime locations in Regency London. So, basically, a legend. Nick Dare is a lord who needs to marry and soon, according to his grandmother. When he mixes up Violet for her younger sister Hyacinth after returning to the London scene following an absence, Violet doesn’t correct him; she lets him continue to think that she’s Hyacinth, of the amazing pianoforte skills, so that he will escort her on outings to various crime locations which would be unseemly for her to visit on her own. Though both initially sees the other as a match of expediency, they gradually grow closer until they eventually…consummate their relationship. It’s only AFTER this point that Lord Dare learns that Violet is not, in fact, Hyacinth, but begrudgingly marries her anyway because, hey, he’s been inside her, and that was the done thing in those days. And then, despite the fact that they’ve started their marriage out on a lie, all things work out and there’s a happily ever after.

Though this is the second book in the Somerset Sisters series, it worked just fine as a standalone. (Note to self: stop requesting books without finding out whether they’re part of a series first.) I’m assuming the first book is about Violet’s sister Iris, who we encounter as well as her new husband, in More or Less a Countess. I didn’t love the twee flower names for the Somerset sisters, but we can’t always get what we want, I suppose.

I did EXTREMELY relate to Violet. A girl who loves true crime, libraries, and cemeteries? Yeah, that’s a romance novel heroine I can get behind, for sure. Also, the very first thing that happens is that she gets stuck in the library when Nick comes in and tups a married woman. Who hasn’t been caught in an awkward situation, and then gets stuck when things have passed the point of no return? We’ve all been there.

The central conflict, that Violet has lied about her name, was SO contrived to me. If this were real life, sure, lying about your name might be a signifier of an underlying tendency to deceive. Or it might just be that it got past the tipping point and it became too awkward to correct him. Granted, I think the bigger problem for Nick is probably that she then decided to use him, but still. Not the best of even terrible fake conflicts that I’ve encountered in romance novels.

Even the secondary conflict, when Nick discovers a sketch that Violet made of him entitled, “The Selfish Rake” from the time that she watched him fuck the married woman in the library, was kind of ridiculous. He gets upset that she’s entitled the piece that way, but, dude, you were. You were undoubtedly and assuredly a selfish rake. It did make a little more sense that he actually overreacted to that because of the specter of his dead older brother, the golden child, and his own feelings of inadequacy that he won’t ever measure up. Still, not an appropriate reason to be a dick to your new wife, even in Regency England.

There were some really great tropes in this one too. One that I’ve been noticing more and more recently is the precocious but naive young woman who understands the act of lovemaking intellectually but asks questions of the experienced man on practicality, which, of course, gets him immediately and irreversibly hard. To be fair, the sexy times were pretty compelling, so it was worth reading for them alone.

There was some fairly funny dialogue, most especially from Gibbs, Lord Dare’s valet. The writing was a little repetitive in places, especially when addressing Violet’s past, and even more so when talking about Lord Derrick.

Overall, a pretty solid three, three and a half stars from me. I didn’t love it, but I liked it enough to read more by Anna Bradley, and I don’t think I’ve read any of her stuff before.

The book has a scheduled release date of August 7. Find out more here.

Thanks to NetGalley and Kensington Books for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.