Trust the faeries to bring on the soap opera messes. One of the consequences of being both incredibly long lived—or even effectivly immortal—and being so variant that you’re more of a species cluster than a true cohesive group is that when the interpersonal dramas hit, they really hit. If you constructed a push-pin map that covered October Daye’s friends, family and allegiances at the start of the series and now, at book twenty, you would be shocked at how things have changed.
But let’s take a step back from the big picture for a moment to look at something a little smaller and domestic; Toby and Tybalt are parents now. Little Andi (sorry, not a fan of her full name) is now about four months old and their house in San Fransisco seems to falling back into a mostly-normal rhythm*. Well, as normal as you can get for a household full of fairy teenagers.
One of these teens is Raysel Torquill, who is one of those characters who Toby has a very mixed history with. But right now their relationship seems to have settled on ‘maternally protective aunt looking after sad teen struggling with her mental health,’ But this housing situation is only temporary; Raysel’s ‘term of offence’—which is currently being served towards the mermaid Dianda, long story— is about to end, and now her mother and father want her to return home.
Now, I think Toby would have been ok if it was just Raysel’s dad—and her liege lord—who had asked for his daughter to come back. But she has a lot of reservations about Raysel spending any kind of extended time with her mother, who is another person whose relationship with Toby has drastically changed over the years; once upon a time, Luna was the ‘maternally protective aunt-like’ character watching over Toby as young changling. Now, it seems she’d watch Toby fall off a cliff with barely more than a ‘Ta-ta and farewell!’
Not matter what Luna has been through the past few years, I just can’t deal with her anymore; I agree with bjornsnipe in their review here when they ask ‘Can we not get some Roundup for this shrub?’ Ignoring everyone else’s wishes except for her own, Luna absconds with Raysel to Blind Michael’s lands. Terrible move; it turns out that Luna’s father’s skerry is not as safe as she thought, and once they’re there, Raysel is snatched by someone else.
As mentioned above, fae relationships and politics are an awful mess, and A Divided Duty is a fantastic display of that. Poor Toby has had to go through a number of betrayals in the years we’ve known her, and there’s one here that just made me very sad. But on the upside, due to the nature of the fae being the damned fae, they are often strangely forgiving when someone shows sincere remorse for any kind of wrongdoing; hence why Toby is willing to look after Raysel when others may not even want to be in the same room as her.
It’s also probably why Toby has been willing to forgive Raysel’s Uncle Simon (who is also Toby’s legal father now; fun times) for his indiscretions , and may be working towards repairing her relationship with Sylvester. Who, by the way, may share more in common with his daughter Raysel than I first assumed; that man’s mental health has also been in the gutter for a long time, and he’s not really been surrounded by the kind of people that know enough about these things to help him.
Tree-lady can go expand her root system into the local sewerage processing plant for all I care.
For anyone else though who is a long-standing reader of the series and like me, is on Maeve-watch, highlights below:
Nope, still no sign of her! Which slightly disappointed me; I thought there would be followup to the mysterious hope chest from Silver and Lead! But Toby seems to have some awareness that she’s likely to turn up. She’s learning.
What looks like the next plot point being built up in series though is the changing or adding of bloodlines, which is slightly different from Toby’s skills in shifting (or removing) them. Blind Michael’s lands have changed and warped many kidnapped children over the centuries, and and Blind Michael is one of Maeve’s children.
Also, we haven’t seen the False Queen since she absconded at the end of Silver and Lead, but what is one of the things she’s really salty over?
Even though it’s a little slow to get going (yes, I have complained about the re-capping before) and and doesn’t have many explosive revelations as some other books, A Divided Duty was still another really enjoyable entry in the series. And just like the last seven or eight installments, there’s a short novella at the end as well, which looks at how Quentin has been doing the last few months.
Let’s just say there’s a fae therapist on the west coast who could make bank if she really wanted to.
For cbr18bingo, this one is Repair. Why? For every relationship that Toby seems intent on repairing.
And that is the rightmost vertical on the card.
