Responses to my reading

Book title: Rosemary and Rue

Author: Seanan McGuire

Publisher and date published: DAW 2009

Version I read: paperback

Where I read it: at home

When I read it: October 17-18, 2009

Why I read it: I'd already bought it a week ago, and I was working through my pile of purchases

How I found it: Browsing in Barnes & Noble

Have I read it before: No

This book was likeable.  But, like Kat Richardson's Underground that I read last week, this is fairly standard urban fantasy.  Competent, interesting enough, but not radically different from other urban fantasy. The fantasy critters in this one are the fae.

Like Richardson's Harper Blaine, our heroine in Rosemary and Rue—October Daye--is a P.I.  Well, she's an ex-P.I. here, but she acts like a P.I.  Like Richardson's books, the heroine tells the story in the first person.  Both Blaine and Daye are clearly channeling Anita Blake.  The supernatural element here is faeries, loosely based on the Celtic tradition.  Daye is a changeling, which here means a half-blood faery rather than a human infant (ex-infant) kidnapped by the faeries.  She's separated from her human family because she got turned into a fish (long backstory, not relevant here), and she's forced to find out who killed a pureblood faery who was her friend or her friend's dying curse will lead to her death.  It's a standard plot that's a cliché because it works very well: someone near the heroine is killed, the heroine finds the killer and brings justice to the world.

A little less clear, at least to me, was why the victim—a powerful faery—knows that someone is coming to kill (or hurt) her, but she stays in her home and merely makes several desperate phone calls to Daye for help.  I mean, why not run like hell for safety?

What I liked most about this book: I like urban fantasy in general.  I appreciated the pronunciation guide at the front of the book.  There are a lot of first-person narratives with female supernatural P.I. characters, but I still enjoy them, though not as much as I did at first.  The supporting cast was generally interesting.  The combination of gritty urban world with the upper-class fae political world is nice.

What I liked least about this book: Like just about every other fantasy book that has multiple races in it, the issue of prejudice promptly raises its head.  No urban fantasy author today fails to hit this note, and personally I am slowly but irrevocably coming to find it a stereotype in its own right. 

As a second matter I also felt there was too much exposition bound to the pureblood v. changeling theme.  I lost count of the paragraphs that ran something like this:

Purebloods weren't subject to my limitations.  A pureblood would have been able to [something impressive].  My magic, though, wasn't as strong.  I could only do [something less impressive].

As a reader, I'm much less interested in what Daye could do if she were pureblooded (which she isn't) than in what she can do right here and now to deal with the villain who is standing right in front of her.  I appreciate the worldbuilding and the information I'm being given, but . . . ideally, I'd have just a smidgen less of the worldbuilding.  That would speed up the plot proportionally. 

My third quibble isn't something I'm sure about even in my own mind.  But I'm beginning to wonder whether fae books really benefit from throwing in every type of fae imagined (which many of them do).  When you have every conceivable type of faerie--from undines and selkies to kitsune—there's a kind of faerie to overcome every plot obstacle.  Once the reader knows that, then the obstacles don't seem quite so obstacle-ish any more.  All the heroine needs to do is locate the right sort of helper for the impossible problem before her, and the problem will evaporate.  And what are the rules of faerie, when all the fae are different?  Here, at least, we seem to have a bright-line rule that iron is deadly, no matter what the type of fae.  I appreciate that immensely because it gives me, the reader, a plausible threat to the characters, one that can't be erased by bringing in the hitherto unknown Fae Type X who just happens to be able to handle iron without any problems.  Sometimes, a narrow range is better than a broad one.  More . . . focused, somehow. 

Sequelish comment:  I noticed a lot of plot threads that were tied off loosely, leaving it fairly obvious that the plot threads would later be untied for a sequel.  Daye's lost her family because they won't answer her phone calls?  Right, that's a strong and determined effort to reach them.  I will eat a large straw hat if one of the sequels doesn't involve Daye's daughter, who will probably turn out to have some inherited changeling abilities.  (Less certain, but I would still suggest it as a good probability, is that Daye's ex-fiance will react with prejudicial horror to the discovery that Daye isn't human, and he will get over this by the end of the novel to leave us with a happy ending.  Or he won't, leaving Daye to a happily-ever-after with Tybalt.)  

Will I read the next two in the series?  Probably.  I now have a bet with myself that at least one of the two upcoming novels will involve a romance with Tybalt and another will involve Daye's reunion with her family.

If you want to respond to anything I said about this book, please feel free to do so in the comment section below!  Your opinion is welcome, be it agreement, disagreement, or just "I read it too."