The Plot:

Toby Daye is finally settling into the hard-won peace and comfort- she’s due to marry her fiance, her squire(s) and her adopted sister live with her in mostly-harmony, and she’s even managed to make peace with her daughter being lost to her, because faerie doesn’t play well with mortals. Even her looming debt to the Luidaeg is eclipsed by her mentor-protege like relationship with the sea witch. She has her old friends, her new friends, and life is good.

Then her Mom comes around and fucks everything up. Amandine is Fae in the most extreme senses of the world. She has her own agenda, and her own idea of how the world is supposed to be. So for Amandine, kidnapping, transforming and imprisoning Toby’s fiance and her sister’s (no relation) girlfriend in order to give Toby an incentive to do her a favor seems perfectly reasonable.

Toby, forced to follow a decades-old trail in search of her missing sister, is obviously far less sanguine about this arrangement. She throws herself into the task with the reckless abandon of someone with everything to lose. She bargains with the Luidaeg again (”there will be a price, and you are so far into my debt already,” the sea witch reminds her), and enlists the help of her estranged stepfather Simon Torquill- aka the man responsible for turning her into a fish for fourteen years, making her lose her life and her changeling daughter. Desperate times, and all that.

Thoughts:

1. I love

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Simon Torquill. I fucking love him to bits. I have so many feelings about him and his character and all the desperation and helplessness that drove him to make the choices he did. I have SO MANY feelings about his actions in this book? ARGH MY HEART.

If you had come to me back when I was reading book 4 with “hey this particular character is going to WRECK you with feelings” I would well- this is Seanan McGuire, so I would probably have been excited to see how she pulled that off. But STILL. I have so many feelings and I did not expect to have these emotions.

2. I also have equally strong feelings about

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Amandine. I remember starting to read the book soon after it was first released and stopping halfway through because I was so furious with her character and I had to calm down a little. A couple of years gave me a bit more distance, but she’s still… a Firstborn who needs to be repeatedly stabbed with an iron sword.

I cannot WAIT for the fallout of her actions in this book. Under most circumstances I’d figure she gets off scot-free because of who she is (I think it was that, more than her actions, which made me so upset the first time around), but a reckoning would be really dramatic and satisfying so I’m hoping for that.

3. That poor police officer needs a plot arc.

4. There are just so many great scenes in this Simon-October buddy comedy and I am IN for all of it? McGuire’s writing (for this series at least) is wry and dryly hilarious as always, which makes their juxtaposition with all of the heartfelt scenes that much more effective. Simon meeting the pixies, THE PIXIES IN GENERAL, everything involving “the way home” because I’m still not okay with how many feelings it gave me, and that wonderful scene between Amandine and

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August

and Toby because I could FEEL THE FURY in that page and it was amazing.

5. All told, this was one of the the more emotionally intense books in the Toby Daye series, which tends to be emotional by default. It was DEVASTATING. I loved it.