fantasy book reviews science fiction book reviewsurban fantasy book reviews Seanan McGuire October Daye 2. A Local HabitationA Local Habitation by Seanan McGuire

I was a little disappointed in Rosemary and Rue, the first OCTOBER DAYE novel, but I could see tons of potential there and looked forward to the rest of the series. A Local Habitation (2010) blows it out of the water, and blows most of the urban fantasy on the shelves out of the water while it’s at it.

In this installment, Duke Sylvester Torquill asks Toby to check up on his niece, January, who hasn’t been returning Sylvester’s calls. Jan is the countess of a small territory that lies between Sylvester’s and that of a rival duchess, and is also the head of a software company. Toby arrives to find a bigger mess than she expected. Someone is murdering Jan’s employees, one by one. Toby’s mission: to solve the crimes without creating a diplomatic incident. This becomes a nail-biting race against time when the major players all get stranded at Jan’s company campus, essentially locked in with the killer.

Toby is stronger here than she was in Rosemary and Rue, more dynamic, and more resourceful. She spends more time focused on the mystery than on her tragic past. I think there are both narrative and character reasons for this. Story-wise, Seanan McGuire doesn’t need to go over the history again because she got that over with in the first book; character-wise, Toby is getting used to being a PI again. When her past does surface, it’s in subtle little touches, like her fear of being submerged in water.

As for the mystery, there’s one aspect that’s really easy for the reader to solve. This drove me crazy as I was reading, but the morning after finishing the book, a few things clicked in my head and it didn’t bother me anymore. Toby has the best excuse in the world to miss that particular type of clue. That, and I suspect McGuire may have tossed that bone to the reader on purpose. It misdirects us from some other things that are going on. It’s a risky move, but it works.

McGuire’s prose is a lot of fun. She infuses her writing with moments of humor and of lyrical beauty, and has a knack for using them at the right times and in the right amounts so that they never take away from the flow or suspense of the narrative. A few of my favorite passages: October Daye Series by Seanan McGuire urban fantasy book reviews

The humans aren’t stupid, no matter what the purebloods say; they’re just blind, and sometimes, that’s worse. They put their fear in stories and songs, where they won’t forget it. “Up the airy mountains and down the rushy glen, I dare not go a-hunting for fear of little men.” We’ve given them plenty of reasons to fear us. Even if they’ve almost forgotten — even if they only remember that we were beautiful and not why they were afraid — the fear was there before anything else. There were reasons for the burning times; there’s a reason the fairy tales survive. And there’s a reason the human world doesn’t want to see the old days come again.

Repetition is sometimes the best way to deal with the Luideag: just keep saying the same thing over and over until she gets fed up and gives you what you want. All preschoolers have an instinctive grasp of this concept, but most don’t practice it on immortal water demons. That’s probably why there are so few disembowelments in your average preschool.

I also loved the little lit-geek moments: lots of references to Shakespeare, plus a great couple of paragraphs in which McGuire riffs on “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in almost the same breath.

The suspense, the world-building, the characterization, and the writing combine to make A Local Habitation a standout. I can’t wait for An Artificial Night; I want more Toby, and definitely more Tybalt!

Published in 2010. October “Toby” Daye is a changeling, the daughter of Amandine of the fae and a mortal man. Like her mother, she is gifted in blood magic, able to read what has happened to a person through a mere taste of blood. Toby is the only changeling who has earned knighthood, and she re-earns that position every day, undertaking assignments for her liege, Sylvester, the Duke of the Shadowed Hills. Now Sylvester has asked her to go to the County of Tamed Lightning—otherwise known as Fremont, CA—to make sure that all is well with his niece, Countess January O’Leary, whom he has not been able to contact. It seems like a simple enough assignment—but when dealing with the realm of Faerie nothing is ever as simple as it seems. Toby soon discovers that someone has begun murdering people close to January, whose domain is a buffer between Sylvester’s realm and a scheming rival duchy. If Toby can’t find the killer soon, she may well become the next victim.

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  • Kelly Lasiter

    KELLY LASITER, with us since July 2008, is a mild-mannered academic administrative assistant by day, but at night she rules over a private empire of tottering bookshelves. Kelly is most fond of fantasy set in a historical setting (a la Jo Graham) or in a setting that echoes a real historical period (a la George RR Martin and Jacqueline Carey). She also enjoys urban fantasy and its close cousin, paranormal romance, though she believes these subgenres’ recent burst in popularity has resulted in an excess of dreck. She is a sucker for pretty prose (she majored in English, after all) and mythological themes.

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