★★★★★ October Daye, Blood and Knives and All

Rosemary and Rue

Seanan McGuire

Rosemary and Rue is the first book in Seanan McGuire's October Daye series. It was McGuire's first book, published in 2009, based on an idea she had in (or before) 1998, when she was just 20 years old. Therefore, it is a bit immature and clunky. Or, at least, that is what McGuire claims in her Foreword,

This is where everything begins. Parts of it seem a little clunky to me now, because I’m so far down this road; I have trouble looking at the earlier books and seeing anything but the flaws. But this was the book that started the story, and if I force myself to read it as something someone else wrote, I can absolutely see that this would be one of my favorite books if I’d found it on the bookstore shelf. I hope it can be one of yours. Toby is the first and in many ways most important of my imaginary friends. I love her so much.

Blood and knives and all.

To be honest, that is not how it strikes me. If I had been handed this novel with no knowledge of its history, I would not have sussed out that it was the first published work of a 31-year-old author. As it happens, I have read all McGuire's Incryptid books and many of her separately published stories, and I can see that the McGuire who wrote Rosemary and Rue was in some respects a less skilled writer than the one she since became. But it is still an extraordinary debut.

Rosemary and Rue introduces us to October (Toby) Daye and to the world she inhabits. Toby is a half-fairy half-human hybrid. In the October Daye world, such hybrids are called changelings. (This is not the usual meaning of the word in European folklore.) Changelings are a despised underclass in fairy society. Indeed, the October Daye stories are largely about oppressed people in a hierarchical society. Toby lives in San Francisco, which is revealed to have a layer of fairy realms ("knowes") invisible to ordinary humans, from whom the fairies hide themselves to avoid conflict.

Toby gets sucked into a murder mystery. Her fight to solve it and survive is bitter and dangerous. Hence the "Blood and knives and all" McGuire mentions in the Foreword. It's an involving, high-stakes fight. It's also very complicated, because McGuire has to introduce Toby, a whole bunch of other characters, and the very complicated world they inhabit. This is something that 2021 McGuire would probably manage more deftly.

The book also contains the novella Strangers in Court, which is a sort of Prolog to the Rosemary and Rue prolog -- it tells us how Toby came to be a knight in Sylvester Torquill's fealty, which is how the prolog of Rosemary and Rue starts.

Strangers in Court is very good -- actually a better story than Rosemary and Rue, albeit shorter. This is for two reasons. First, it is more focused -- it doesn't have the sprawl of Rosemary and Rue. Second, Toby has more agency in Strangers in Court -- she takes initiatives and has clever ideas. In Rosemary and Rue, in contrast, Toby's role in the story is more or less that of a rag doll chew toy who is tossed and chomped on by larger and more powerful dogs. She can only do what she has to do. Aside from being the baddest b***h in San Francisco, Toby doesn't show a lot of individuality in Rosemary and Rue.

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