Monday, September 24, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Night and Silence (October Daye #12) by Seanan McGuire




Night and Silence is the twelfth book in Seanan McGuire's October Daye series, a fae/urban fantasy series set in San Francisco.  October Daye is one of my favorite ongoing series that I read right now, and I've looked forward to this book for quite some time.  The series can always/usually be counted on to give you fun characters and dialogue (even if the situations they find themselves in sometimes get very dark), plots that are interesting and twisting and often have roots in events from way back earlier in the series, and a lot of creative use of Fae and magic.

Alas, Night and Silence might be my least favorite October Daye book in quite some time, maybe of the series itself.  This is not due to any problem necessarily with the book in isolation, but due to the fact that the plot of the book is well....very very similar to that of some prior works in the series, particularly Book 5 (One Salt Sea) to a major extent and Book 9 (A Red-Rose Chain) to a lesser extent.  The book answers one major question the series had previously posed, but the answer was one I'd guessed (the danger of seeding plot points within past books is that reveals are guess-able), even if the method of reveal was a little surprising.  That's not to say the book wasn't enjoyable - I've already reread it three times lol - but it was disappointing in that it felt a bit like a retread and a placeholder for the series.

Note 1: If you couldn't figure it out, the twelfth book in this series is not a great starting point for new readers.  In theory, new readers could skip books 1-5 and commence with Book 6, I guess, but readers are strongly advised to begin the series from the beginning (even though I think books 1-2 are among the weakest volumes due almost certainly to McGuire still getting her bearings)

Note 2: This post will necessarily contain some spoilers for prior books in the series, but I will be spoiler free for Night and Silence itself. For a spoilery discussion of this book, see THIS post.

Note 3:  Like the prior two books in the series, Night and Silence comes with a bonus novella attached.  That novella's plot is even more of a direct response to the events of this book however, so while I will vaguely discuss it below, I will not be including it in the plot summary:

----------------------------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------------------------
Life is not all right for October Daye.  After her mother's forced transformation of Tybalt, her fiance, Tybalt finds himself shellshocked and uncomfortable in his own forms....and has fled from Toby's presence and left her alone.  May finds herself in a similar situation (albeit less badly) with Jazz and is similarly distressed.  And her father figure Sylvester doesn't want her around due to her letting loose his murderous brother.

And then her Ex and his wife show up at her doorstep with the news that her daughter, Gillian, is missing once again.  Two and a Half Years ago (Book 5: A Salt Sea), Gillian was kidnapped by a Fae enemy and Toby was forced to turn her fully human and to withdraw entirely from Gillian's life in order to save Gillian's life....and the result nearly broke Toby's heart.  Now, amidst signs that Gillian may yet once again have been kidnapped to get at Toby, the threat has become more dire...for there is no way that Toby can simply erase Faerie from Gillian's mind once again, and if not, can she truly be allowed to live?

And then there's the fact that whoever took Gillian seems to have connections to someone with ancient Fae ties, ties that might bind Toby to the sea-change that once ended an era of Faerie altogether......
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The October Daye series, like any long-running series, can really be broken down into a series of arcs.  This is not to say that books from an earlier arc don't contain parts that will come back to roost in later arcs, which is a specialty of this series (for example, the major reveal of this book was first hinted at way back in book 3), but certain books are more easily grouped together because they seem to be written in response directly to each other.  So roughly:

Books 1-3 (Rosemary and Rue, A Local Habitation, An Artificial Night):  The Beginning of October's story as she learns to become a part of Faerie once more and gathers new friends and allies.
Books 4-5 (Late Eclipses, A Salt Sea): The Brief tale of Countess October Daye, her first love, and her realization of what she truly is.
Books 6-8 (Ashes of Honor, Chimes at Midnight, The Winter Long): October's second return to Faerie, her Second Love, and becoming a Hero of the Realm
Books 9-10 (A Red-Rose Chain, Once Broken Faith): The Saga of Elf-Shot and October Daye, Kingbreaker.

Night and Silence is quite clearly a response to the prior book in the series, The Brightest Fell (Book 11), which was one of the darkest books in the series.  Toby and her friends had been in a pretty good place ten books in, but that eleventh book wrecked them, traumatizing two of the main squad's five members (and that was after those two were rescued from a worse fate) and leaving Toby further isolated from people she considered family.  Night and Silence reverses that....somewhat.  Not all of the aftereffects of The Brightest Fell can be shaken off so easily* and they're not fully reversed when all is said and done, but the book takes a situation that clearly had to change in order for things to progress and does so.

*Although what is shaken off is kind of done fairly quickly once it happens.*

 The problem is, that while the Book is in most ways a classic Toby Daye novel, featuring a bunch of characters I truly love and care about and some great dialogue, it makes these changes by very closely adhering to a plot we've already seen in this series.  Like in Book 5: A Salt Sea, Toby is facing the kidnapping of her daughter by Faerie and the possibility that the safety of Faerie might require Gillian's death (assuming Toby can rescue Gillian in the first place).  Like in Book 5, our final confrontation comes between the hero and the villains in a lair, where the result is dangerously tragic.  And while I won't spoil who the villains are in this post (more in that second post I mentioned earlier), they're not new villains either, and their motivations are the same as in the last book they appeared.

This is not to say that the effects of this book are small - there is one major reveal, and a major change in the status quo besides the remedying (somewhat) of the effects of the last book.  Still, even the major reveal was one that avid readers might have seen coming (I did, except in how the reveal would take place).  But the fact that the plot of this book feels so damn familiar makes it feel very much like this book was more of a placeholder, with the plot an afterthought just meant to set up a new status quo for the next arc - the major change in the status quo for example clearly will raise the stakes for an event that has been teased since book 5....and which the title of next year's Book 13 suggests may finally be coming.

I've been fairly negative in this review, and I want to make this clear:  while I do think this might be the weakest book in the series, that's largely a factor of how high the bar has been set by the book's predecessors.  If Book 5 didn't exist, this book would have been far more exciting, as it would've been much more fresh....but it does exist, and if you've come this far into the series, it's not likely you'll have forgotten it.  I look forward heavily to Book 13, as I looked forward heavily to this book, because I love this series and I am not quite satisfied here.

One Final Note:  This book, for the third straight book, comes with a bonus novella: "Suffer a Sea-Change."  I won't talk too much of this in this non-spoiler post (but will discuss it a bit in the next spoiler-filled post) as this novella directly addresses the status quo change I hint at above from the perspective of a spoiler character, with part of it being a scene in the full novel from a different point of view.  The novella obviously doesn't work independently of the novel (duh), but I enjoyed it quite a bit as a way of addressing the change and seeing the world of Faerie from a brand new perspective - which I don't expect to see any more of in the future....but I'd be very happy to be wrong about that.

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