★★★★☆ What a tangled web we weave...

Sleep No More

Seanan McGuire

Seanan McGuire did a terrible thing. Be the Serpent, book 16 in her October Daye series, ended shortly after a triumphant battle in which Toby and her friends defeated Titania, the evil Summer Queen of Faerie, and forced her to submit to a geas that by all rights, should have kept Toby and her friends safe -- Titania cannot harm Toby or her family. But Titania is ancient and wily. Her final words to Toby are

“I can’t hurt you.” She finally smiled. “But I can make you someone else’s problem.”

And then, in the final chapter we met a new Toby, living as a servant with her mother Amandine the Liar and her pureblood sister August, with her husband Tybalt nowhere in evidence. Clearly Titania found a loophole to subject Toby without "harming" her, within what her geas understands as harm.

So this is where Sleep No More begins. Toby is living in an illusory world crafted by Titania. This is a Toby you will hardly recognize. She is submissive, a timid servant. And it is not just Toby. Titania's Brave New World covers several faerie realms in the vicinity of San Francisco. Everyone there has been brainwashed to perceive a distorted history that makes a world as Titania believes it should be. Several things that Titania believes should not exist do not exist in Titania's illusory world. For instance, shapeshifters (Cu Sidhe and Cait Sidhe among them) died out long ago, and the Undersea is uninhabited.

Titania is powerful, but not all-powerful. She is one of these people -- you probably know some in Real Life -- who is so smart she's stupid. She is the queen of illusions, but her ability to alter reality itself is limited. That leaves cracks in the edifice she has constructed.

The exploitation of the first crack is a splendid little story involving some of my favorite characters from the October Daye world January O'Leary, Li Qin Zhou, and their adopted electronic dryad daughter April. I really enjoyed this. After the opening of that first crack, though, the story becomes more of a slog. The illusion Titania created is complex and built of many parts, and it takes Toby and the allies she gradually gathers (and you, her reader) time and effort to work their way through them in detail.

Toby's husband Tybalt is a minor character in Sleep No More. Presumably he is off somewhere else doing other important stuff most of the time. Indeed, we know from the publisher's blurb that book 18, The Innocent Sleep, will tell Tybalt's story during this time.

Seanan, you are not yet forgiven. We're still mad about the cliffhanger and the wimpification of our badass heroine. Perhaps The Innocent Sleep will clear your account.

CANDLES AND STARLIGHT

As usual, McGuire ends the book with a bonus novella. This one is called Candles and Starlight, and is temporally contemporaneous with Sleep No More. It is told in the first person, by Toby's sort-of-cousin Rayseline, the daughter of her sort-of uncle Sylvester Torquill. Raysel has had a super-messed-up childhood and is still afraid of a bunch of powerful fae. Near the end of Be the Serpent Raysel and Toby managed to make Toby Raysel's legal guardian for a year. Raysel is looking forward with gleeful anticipation to a year of living in Toby's home with Quentin, May, etc.

She doesn't get it, because she and Toby are caught in Titania's spell almost immediately. Candles and Starlight tells her story from that point until the moment when she appears in Sleep No More.

I thank NetGalley and DAW for an advance reader copy of Sleep No More. This review expresses my honest opinion.

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