★★★☆☆ Twice-told tales

The Innocent Sleep

Seanan McGuire

In Sleep No More Seanan McGuire tells the story of Toby's fight against Titania's attempt to rewrite all of faerie the way she wants it to be. In Sleep No More this story is told in the first person by Toby herself. The Innocent Sleep tells the same story from the first-person point of view of Toby's husband, Tybalt. (By the way, I assume you have read Sleep No More. If you haven't, this review will contain spoilers.)

McGuire has made rather of habit of writing books in which the essence of the plot and the outcome have been given away prior to publication. For instance, several of the novellas in her Wayward Children series have plots that were thoroughly spoiled in Every Heart a Doorway, the first book of that series. And the most egregious example of this strategy occurs in the Newsflesh series (published under her Mira Grant nom de plume). Book four, Feedback, recounts the exact same events as the previous three books, but from the point of view of a different team of reporters.

Of course, McGuire is not the first or most famous of the story-tellers who have used this approach. The idea that a story is different depending on who tells it is valid and often leads to interesting results.

This, in my opinion, is not such a case. Any long-time reader of the October Daye series knows Tybalt quite well and can predict fairly accurately how he will react to the events of Sleep No More. There is a little bit of story that he knows and Toby doesn't, but for the most part the story as told by Tybalt is as a fan of the series would predict. And of course any suspense about outcomes is vitiated by the reader already knowing all the important ones in advance.

Strictly edited, Tybalt's point of view during the events of Sleep No More would have made an excellent bonus novella for that novel. As an entire novel in its own right, it is padded and predictable.

DOUBTLESS AND SECURE

Like all McGuire's novels, The Innocent Sleep is followed by a bonus novella, Doubtless and Secure. Doubtless and Secure is another twice-told tale, but a better one than The Innocent Sleep. It is told from the point of view of Helmi, a Cephali (that's a type of fae that looks like a cephalopod/human chimera). We have long known Helmi as the chief retainer of the Merrow Dianda, the Duchess (i.e., ruling monarch) of the Duchy of Saltmist, an undersea kingdom off the coast of California. We have never heard directly from Helmi before. Also, the story she tells spans centuries and puts together a long list of stories about Dianda, and how she came to be Duchess of Saltmist, and her husbands Patrick and Simon and their children. There is little here that hasn't been told elsewhere, but since much of the tale was scattered in short stories that a reader would have had to seek out, since we've never heard direct from Helmi before, and above all since this is just a novella, and no attempt has been made to stretch it out to a full-length novel, Doubtless and Secure skates clear of the worst problems of The Innocent Sleep.

Thanks to NetGalley and DAW for an advance reader copy of The Innocent Sleep. This review expresses my honest opinions. 

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