★★★★☆ 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.

Amazon review

Goodreads review

Comments

★★★★☆ More tragic than funny

This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor Adam Kay ** spoiler alert ** I was told that This is Going to Hurt was a very funny book that would make me laugh out loud. It is that. However, when I reached the end I felt I had just finished reading a tragedy. In the United Kingdom, the government runs hospitals and directly employs doctors. This is different from the healthcare systems in the USA and Canada, with which I am most familiar. Here doctors and hospitals are small and big businesses -- the government's role is mostly to administer insurance programs that pay the healthcare businesses. (The USA does have one direct government-run healthcare systems that I know of -- the Veteran's Administration.) At the beginning of This is Going to Hurt Adam Kay is finishing medical school, and decides to become an obstetrician-gynecologist (OB/GYN), a field known among English medical students as "brats and twats". He is also newly married. He ...

★★★☆☆ Not quite what I expected

Wings of War: The World War II Fighter Plane That Saved the Allies and the Believers Who Made It Fly David Fairbank White, Margaret Stanback White Wings of War was not quite what I expected. Based on the publisher's blurb, I thought it would be a chronicle of the science and engineering behind a crucial war-winning weapon, the P-51 Mustang fighter. Thus, I was expecting something like Richard Rhodes ' The Making of the Atomic Bomb , or Andrew Hodges ' Alan Turing: The Enigma , which tells the story of how England secretly broke Nazi codes, or Chance and Design by Alan Hodgkin , which in part describes his work developing radar targeting devices for use in aircraft. Authors David Fairbank White and Margaret Stanback White (whom I will henceforth refer to as "the Whites") completely succeeded in convincing me that the P-51 Mustang (why was an airplane named after a feral horse? -- OK, not important...) is on a par with Bletchley Park and radar as an innovation ...

★★★★☆ Don't mind working without a net

A Gathering of Shadows V.E. Schwab I expected to enjoy A Gathering of Shadows , the second novel in Victoria Schwab 's Shades of Magic trilogy , more than the first, A Darker Shade of Magic . I did, and for exactly the reason I expected. Darker Shade was mostly about Kell. Indeed, it is he who is pictured on the cover of the paperback edition . Kell is, honestly, a bit boring. Or at least, I find him so. But it was obvious when we reached the end that the next book would concentrate more on Lila Bard . It did, and I am happy. Opinions may differ, of course, but in mine, Lila is just inherently more fun than Kell. That's partly because Lila is discovering her powers, so her magic is more open-ended. But much more important is Lila's character. Lila's approach to life is "Leap first, look later". She has faith in possibility -- that whatever she leaps into, she'll manage to figure it out. I was reminded of the Mary Chapin...

★★★☆☆ Be wary. Be clever. Be good.

One Dark Window Rachel Gillig I finished One Dark Window with a feeling of dissatisfaction, that I'm having a hard time explaining. When I updated my progress at 57%, I remarked "Too much smolder, too little actual fire." By that I meant that it seemed as if Rachel Gillig spent all her time telling us how to feel, and too little describing actual events. Now, objectively, that is false. One Dark Window is full of event -- there are battles and magic spells and romance. Yet, somehow, I can't shake the impression. If you asked me to summarize the plot of One Dark Window , I would find it difficult. Even though I just finished it last night, I have a hard time remembering the events of the story, or arranging them into any semblance of order -- salient/nonsalient, this happened because of that... The Acknowledgements provide a small hint of the nature of the problem. Gillig writes, "To John, my husband who brags about me, holds and feed...

★★★★☆ It's in the blood

Murder of Crows Anne Bishop Murder of Crows , the second novel in Anne Bishop 's The Others series, begins with Meg kicking Simon out of her bed. That doesn't mean what you probably think it means. Simon wakes Meg up from a scary dream, and in her sudden fright, she literally kicks him. But what was Simon doing in Meg's bed? He was sleeping. Yes, Simon and Meg are sleeping with each other. But that, while literally true, doesn't mean what the phrase usually means. Near the end of Written in Red , Meg was attacked by a team of kidnappers/murderers and almost killed. In Murder of Crows she's still working through some post-traumatic stress. Having a warm, friendly, scary-safe wolf in bed with her makes it easier for her to sleep. Simon and Meg are not romantically involved with each other, but their relationship was an important plot thread of Written in Red , continues to be important in Murder of Crows , and, I confidently predict, will be...

★★★★★ Peter in captivity

Lies Sleeping Ben Aaronovitch ** spoiler alert ** I read Ben Aaronovitch 's Lies Sleeping for the first time a year and a half ago, on kindle -- my review here . Since then I have read every currently extant work in the Rivers of London series. At the date of writing this review that includes novels through Amongst Our Weapons and novellas through Winter's Gifts . Wanting good audiobooks to listen to while walking or driving, I have been working my way through the series in audio format. The experience is different from the first read, because it's an audiobook (duh...) but also because I know how everything is going to work out, and I know what these characters will become to Peter. There will be spoilers in the following. You have been warned! In this novel the Met mounts a major operation to get The Faceless Man, who we now know to be one Martin Chorley. Lesley May is working with Chorley. Chorley has a complicated plan to s...

★★★★☆ Responsibility and complicity

The Will of the Many James Islington Suppose you are a citizen of some nation. As a citizen, you pay taxes. Your government, supported by your taxes, does some horrifying evil thing. (I won't give an example, since we all, almost by definition, disagree about what those things are.) Are you responsible for the evil? Suppose that these immoral things done by your government benefit you, perhaps only in some indirect way over which you have no control. Are you complicit in the evil? Here is what one of the characters of The Will of the Many has to say on the subject “Then they were participants and by definition, shared guilt.” “They didn’t have a choice.” ... "Anyone who does not resist them ... is lending them their strength. Is complicit in all that they do." That is the view of just one character -- most others have more nuanced and realistic ideas. But those questions of collective responsibility and complicity are what The Will of the Many is about. As philos...

★★★★☆ Emily Wilde is terrifying

Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales Heather Fawcett Everyone seems to think that Heather Fawcett 's Emily Wilde novels are a Cozy Fantasy series. I don't see it. I'm not saying you're wrong, if you think that. No one but you can tell you how you feel, and if Emily gives you a cozy feeling, then she just does, and there is no more to be said about it. But I just don't see it. In Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries Emily tortures a child, then defeats a terrifying fairy king in part by chopping off her own finger with an axe. In Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands she infiltrates a fairy kingdom and gets rid of the ruler by poisoning her. She has a familiar called Shadow who is a monstrous Black Hound. I'm not going to tell you what she does in Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales , except to say that she doesn't dial it back. She terrifies even her romantic interest Wendell. He is not afraid she will harm him, but that she will, by...

★★★☆☆ 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...

★☆☆☆☆ Simon, incredibly, becomes even more tedious

Like a Dream Seanan McGuire Like a Dream is Seanan McGuire 's Patreon reward for November 2022. She introduces it in this way: And now it's time for November, wherein Simon gets to learn more about the mortal concepts being therapy and medical treatment. He's having a week. This is a story in the October Daye universe. It continues the (now quite long) series of Patreon stories about Simon Torquill trying to adjust himself to domestic life with his wife and husband Dianda and Patrick (yes, it's a mariage à trois) and daughter August. Simon has a history of having been abused and coerced into doing awful things that's he's trying to put behind him. Now that he's no longer loathsome he's full of self-loathing. A nicer person than me might have tender feelings towards Simon and wish him well. But I am an awful person and I cannot help feeling that, like Marvin the Paranoid Android , Simon's company is unbearable. This one is more tedious than ever be...

Search This Blog