So it’s the day before New Year’s Eve and I have a cold so maybe I will hit my Cannonball anyhow
Every year since I first started about five years ago I have endeavoured to review the latest in the October Day series, so I was shocked when I realised I hadn’t managed to do it this year. And this year is a bit of an unusual one because Seanan McGuire didn’t put out just one October Day book, but two.
The question is though, does it really take two books to make our way through the absolute Gainax Ending that we were left with last year?
The answer to that one is probably not, but I’m quite grateful for it anyhow?
Sleep No More is the 17th novel in the series so once again I will not be terribly worried about spoilers for previous books—it’s getting a bit difficult to pull off. As I mentioned above, we had an absolutely bizarro ending to the previous book Be the Serpent. Which ended with a returned Titania doing something to Toby. Titania, Queen of Illusions. On a rampage. Yikes on Bikes.
However, it doesn’t take us long to find out what exactly Titania’s brand of bullshit involves in Sleep No More. This book begins with Toby living in her mother’s tower with a sister August, acting like they have known each other their entire lives. This doesn’t match with reality, as we all know Toby barely knows August, and is still not super friendly with her. Toby seems to think this is the way things have always been—a Faerie realm with no contact with the mortal world and very little space for changeling such as herself. So you only need to get a few pages into the book before realising a big old fuckery is playing out.
Interestingly, no one else around Toby seems to remember the world as it was either. So this must be a whopper of a spell. We have a Simon who never went off-kilter or missing and a Sylvester who never got married and had a daughter. And it’s fascinating to see how similar and how different each of these characters are under radically different Faerie. Like we get a little touch of nature versus nurture for all of them.
The difference between one individual in the ‘real’ reality and in this make-believe world is actually quite shocking and I’ll be scratching my head about that for a while.
But it doesn’t take long before everything around Toby starts to unravel… and as attached as Toby is to this ‘reality’ and her current mindset, it cannot be denied that the reality that she finds herself in is not the true one and she pushed forward by the efforts of many others to try and break the spell.
The second book released this year was The Innocent Sleep. And this is the first full novel in the series to be not told from October’s viewpoint, but Tybalts. So this makes it more of a companion novel to Sleep No More (a book 17.5, if you will) and they need to be taken together. While the two stories eventually converge, they are very divergent at the start. Titania, powerful as she is, is also a dirty great big bigot. She’s really only concerned with the pure-blood fae—and the pure-blood fae that resemble people at that. Everyone else can go kick rocks. Or in this case, get themselves magically exiled. And then killed.
So everyone who does not follow the Queen’s ideals has found themselves squeezed into the margins. The Undersea is out. And so are the Cat Sidhe. In both cases, they are confined to their respective realms and only a select few individuals can move between them. And as heartbroken and angry as Tybalt is, he is still a King of Cats, with duties to his people that cannot be neglected. It’s here we see the broader applications of Tatiana’s faerie supremacist bullshittery, and it’s really clear that she just does not give a fuck about anyone who is not useful to her.
Tybalt is a very different character from October. I know we are visiting his head particularly emotionally stressful time, but our guy is Angst Central. His anger and frustration are only amplified when he learns that while there is a chance to rescue October, he has to wait four months before the window of opportunity opens*.
Overall while I quite liked both of these books, I wouldn’t say that they were top-tier for the series— they’re no Night and Silence, for example. They are not as tightly plotted as some of the earlier entries, with both of them having very rushed endings—that don’t seem 100% complete. And the further we get into The Innocent Sleep the more it overlaps with the previous book and the less surprised you’ll be by the narrative. However, on a character-building level, we learn quite a lot about the inner natures of some of the periphery characters, which is very welcome. We also get some nice additions to the lore, which seems to be building up to a crescendo.
Whether or not we’re moving into the final stanza in These Violent Delights I cannot say. But what I can say those this is going to bring is very close to a certain somebody’s due date… so my guess that is someone is going to become a mum, and someone else is going to be looking for her mum.
Each of these books has a little novella at the end. The first of these is told from Raysel’s perspective, which fills in a couple of gaps in the narrative. The other gives us some background on the Undersea, but it doesn’t stand on its own.
*The end of October. LOLOL