Skip to main content

★★★★★ Mercy's rise to power

Silence Fallen

Patricia Briggs

** spoiler alert **


I read all twelve extant novels of Patricia Briggs's Mercy Thompson series before I began seriously using Goodreads in late 2020. I have not previously reviewed any of them. Number thirteen, Soul Taken, is to be released Tuesday, 23-Aug-2022, one week from today. Of course I have pre-ordered it and plan to gobble it down as soon as it appears on my kindle. Because it's been so long since I read a Mercy Thompson novel, I'm re-reading the last three, Silence Fallen, Storm Cursed, and Smoke Bitten, to get myself back up to speed.

This is, therefore, a convenient occasion to write down my overall impressions of the entire series. Mercy Thompson was my introduction to urban fantasy, and is still my favorite.

Silence Fallen is a good place to do this, because it is the first explicit acknowledgment of something that has been in progress since book one, Moon Called. Silence Fallen begins with Mercy's kidnapping by the European vampire lord Bonarata. Bonarata kidnaps her because he is becoming alarmed by events in Mercy's home turf, the Columbia Basin, and Wulfe (a Columbia Basin vampire) tells him that she is the most powerful magical person there. Now, Wulfe is not a liar, but he traffics in misleading truths. We thus come to realize that Mercy is, indeed, the most powerful magical person in the Columbia Basin, but not in the superficial way that Bonarata imagined.

How did she get there? In book one, Moon Called, we meet Mercy and she gets into trouble with the local werewolves. In book two, Blood Bound, she gets into trouble with the local vampires. In Iron Kissed she gets into trouble with local fae. At this point I began to perceive a pattern -- probably you do, too. I was becoming alarmed for Mercy. Mercy is a VW mechanic and Blackfeet Nation Native American who has the ability to turn into a coyote. She is not especially powerful, either physically or magically. Yet she's making enemies of the most powerful magical persons in the Columbia Basin. How's she going to survive?

Well, she survives by becoming more powerful herself. That should have been an obvious guess, because it's what happens in every fantasy series centered on a single character. But I was taken by surprise because Mercy doesn't do it in the usual way. The usual way is to level up in each book by acquiring new magic and new superpowers. A little of that happens to Mercy, but mostly not. Mostly Mercy becomes more powerful the way that real people in The Real World become more powerful: by making friends and forming alliances.

To understand this, you need to understand something else about the Mercy Thompson series. They are not primarily books about magical creatures. They are about politics and palace intrigue. The pillars of magical society in the Mercyverse are the three groups I've mentioned: werewolves, vampires, and fae. (This is a simplification -- there are other magical beings. Mercy herself, for instance, is none of the above.) Werewolves and vampires are territorial -- they live in local authoritative polities ("packs" and "seethes", respectively) with roughly the scope of a city. The power struggles within these polities have the feel of a Renaissance Italian city-state. The fae are more diverse and chaotic, but there is a body, the Gray Lords, that exerts some authority over the fae by main force.

Mercy gains power because she is a good friend, someone who gets things done, and who you can absolutely rely on. By the time of Silence Fallen she has become the wife of Adam Hauptman, the leader of the Columbia Basin werewolves, and she has negotiated a pact by which the local vampire seethe and fae lords can be relied on to protect the people of the Basin from magical dangers. Mercy, although she doesn't entirely realize it herself, is the de facto head of state of this little city-state she has effectively created by accident.

So, Bonarata kidnaps Mercy. With her usual resourcefulness she gets herself out of that problem and into another. Adam flies to Italy to get her back. We get a lot of Mercyverse-canonical political maneuvering, complete with battles physical, magical, and psychological. It's as gripping a story as I have come to expect from Briggs.

Amazon review

Goodreads review
 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Add a comment!

Popular posts from this blog

★★★★☆ What are these people?

Red Side Story Jasper Fforde When I reviewed   Shades of Grey , the first novel in  Jasper Fforde 's  Shades of Grey  series, I asked Although I referred to Eddie as a young man, it is not clear to me what the people of the Collective are. I think they are more-or-less human. ... However, in some ways they behave like automata. These are puzzles that I hope Jasper Fforde will clear up in subsequent novels in the Shades of Grey series. Now I'm patting myself on the back, because that is indeed what  Red Side Story  is about. Or so say I. You might think it is about other things -- a love story, a fight to survive, a battle for justice, a cycle race -- and you would not be wrong.  Red Side Story  contains multitudes. Shades of Grey  ended in a flurry of revelations about the Collective. Eddie, Jane and Courtland Gamboge visited the abandoned town of High Saffron, where Jane revealed that all the people supposedly sent to Reboot were in fact sen...
Post a Comment
Read more

★★★★★ A Cyberspace Cowboy

Count Zero William Gibson Count Zero  was the first book in  William Gibson 's  Cyberspace  trilogy I read. I picked it up in an airport bookstore, where it was on display, so it was probably pretty newly published -- let's say 1984. The Internet existed -- I had been using it to send email, although that was still pretty difficult and took some figgerin. It would be another ten years before  Tim Berners-Lee 's World-Wide Web got off the ground as a thing that any academic could use, and thus a version of  Gibson 's cyberspace became real. There were no eBooks back them (not really), which meant that a person like me, who must ALWAYS have a book to read, had to carry a backpack full of heavy paper books when I traveled. A quick glance in the bookstore made it clear that  Count Zero  was my kind of book. And it was. As it happens, the series works almost equally well in the order  Count Zero ,  Neuromancer ,  Mona Lisa Overdrive ...
Post a Comment
Read more

★★★☆☆ The Great Geometer

The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius Patchen Barss If I were asked to name the greatest physicists of the second half of the twentieth century, I would probably choose three:  Richard Feynman ,  Steven Weinberg , and  Roger Penrose . (I am a neuroscientist and a mathematician with a long interest in physics. I'm not the best person to choose great physicists, but I'm not the worst.) Thus when my local Theoretical Physics Institute (every town should have one!), the  Perimeter Institute , announced a public presentation by  Patchen Barss , a science journalist who has written this biography of  Penrose , I immediately snagged a ticket. Barss  wounded my confidence by emitting that cliché of the science popularizer: that you make science interesting by telling the "human story." Oh, please! I don't read a biography of  Penrose  for the sake of the human story. Why do science popularizers find it so hard to believe that there...
Post a Comment
Read more

★★★★☆ A Study in Scarlett

The Notorious Scarlett and Browne Jonathan Stroud A warning to begin -- this review will contain spoilers for book 1 of the series  The Outlaws Scarlett and Browne . I will, however, try to avoid spoilers for this book itself,  The Notorious Scarlett and Browne . In fact, this review is much easier to write than the one for  Outlaws , because now I can be upfront about Albert's mental powers -- he reads minds, and he has poorly controlled telekinetic powers, which so far have mostly manifested in the form of huge explosions in his vicinity that somehow luckily spare Albert himself and his friends grievous bodily harm. In  Outlaws  we learned most of the story of Albert's life, at least to the extent he himself knows it, through flashback chapters. His earliest memories are of Stonemoor -- a prison/education facility for people like Albert who have mental powers -- and of Dr Calloway there, who tormented him, ostensibly to teach him to control his powers. I confe...
Post a Comment
Read more

★★★★★ Forensic anthropology fiction

Déjà Dead Kathy Reichs I discovered  Kathy Reichs '  Temperance Brennan  books when a young lady I was chatting with told me she wished to become a forensic anthropologist. That seemed oddly specific, and my curiosity was aroused. It took only a little investigation to discover Tempe Brennan. I have not read the entire series, but I have read at least through #16  Bones of the Lost . The great strength of the Tempe Brennan books is their authenticity. Tempe Brennan is a forensic anthropologist who lives and works in North Carolina and Montreal. It is obviously no coincidence that  Kathy Reichs  is a forensic anthropologist who divides her time between Charlotte, NC, and Montreal. She is also on the Board of Directors of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. So, she knows this stuff cold. It shows. The Tempe Brennan novels are very technical -- so technical that I'm surprised anyone but me reads them. If you want a detailed description of the succession...
Post a Comment
Read more

★★★★☆ Witch/Cinderella story

Not a Drop to Drink Seanan McGuire Not a Drop to Drink  is  Seanan McGuire 's February 2024 Patreon reward. She introduces it as follows: Just a small rumination on the nature of witches and heroes this month, and how much things change depending on where you're standing when the sky falls down. (Image: Elsie on the dining room table, posing with a copy of The Wild Beyond the Witchlight .) It's a brief (nine pages in PDF) standalone short story about witches and water. It is everything a short story should be! Not a Drop to Drink on Patreon  
Post a Comment
Read more

★★★☆☆ Magnificent, followed by dismal

Children of Memory Adrian Tchaikovsky Here's where  Children of Ruin  left us: the ark ship Gilgamesh encountered the first truly alien life in  the Children of Time series  on the planet Nod. This included greedily curious information-hoarding bacteria capable of taking over any living thing they encounter. An expedition from Kern's World convinces them to accept a truce in which they agree not to take over any organism without its consent. We thus ended up with a team of AI, Humans and spiders from Kern's world, octopuses from Damascus, and a Human emulation running on a Nodan bacteria substrate. They discover a way to traverse space instantly, without light-speed limitations, and set out to explore the galaxy. Their first targets are the worlds to which Earth sent terraforming teams. Two such worlds, Rourke and Imir, are visited in  Children of Memory . The first thought that struck me when I began  Children of Memory  was, "This is a reminder that...
Post a Comment
Read more

★★★★★ Witches and pain magic

Storm Cursed Patricia Briggs As I have noted  elsewhere , the three pillars of magical society in  Patricia Briggs 's  Mercyverse , also  Mercyverse , are werewolves, vampires, and fae. However, she also feels free to import any folkloric creatures that anyone has ever told stories about. Thus Mercy herself is descended from First Nation not-quite-a-god Coyote. Aside from the big three, most of these other magical beings are one-offs. And since  Briggs  is all about the politics and palace intrigue, they don't have the standing to become pillars of Mercyverse magical society. In fact, the first three books,  Moon Called ,  Blood Bound , and  Iron Kissed , served as introductions to werewolves, vampires, and fae, respectively. If there is a fourth, it is witches. Witches are important in  the Mercy Thompson series  and even more in the companion Mercyverse series  Alpha and Omega . Columbia basin witch Elizaveta Arkadyevna has a...
Post a Comment
Read more

★★★☆☆ Commentary disguised as a novel

The Handmaid's Tale Margaret Atwood I think I read  The Handmaid’s Tale  around 1986, when it first came out and became famous. I found it tedious. I have since looked at one or two other works by  Margaret Atwood , and honestly, I have never enjoyed one. You have probably spotted my problem. It is that verb "enjoy". I read books for enjoyment. Not only enjoyment, but also enlightenment and information, and to broaden my mind. But I also enjoy those things, so the verb "enjoy" should not be taken to imply that I will only read a book that is a ball of fun fluff. (Indeed, if you care to peruse the list of books I have recently reviewed, you'll see a five-star review for  Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos: With Applications to Physics, Biology, Chemistry, and Engineering . Let me just state, for the record, that  The Handmaid’s Tale  is less entertaining than  Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos . To me! Of course I speak only for myself.) But  The Handmaid’s T...
Post a Comment
Read more

★★★☆☆ Excellent introduction to Barack Obama

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance Barack Obama I read  Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance  early in 2006, I think, for what was at the time an obvious reason. It was becoming clear that  Barack Obama  was going to be a serious contender in the 2008 US presidential election. I had heard  Obama 's speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention (and it was a beauty), but knew little about him otherwise. So, when I heard that he had published a book, I wanted to read it. Now, it is customary (or at least not unusual) for new US presidential candidates to publish a book to introduce themselves to those US citizens who read books. Most American presidential candidates are not intellectually capable of writing a book, so these potted campaign books are usually ghost-written, stump speeches puffed up to book length. They are typically brief and yet achingly tedious. Dreams from My Father  is not one of these. It was writt...
Post a Comment
Read more