Book Reviews: A Tale Twice Told

I'm a big fan of Seanan McGuire's "October Daye" fantasy series, so I was intrigued by this story told from the viewpoints of two major characters: Toby herself and her new husband, Tybalt, King of Cats. Here are my reviews of the duology.

Sleep No More, by Seanan McGuire (DAW)

October Daye’s magical life has unfolded over the past many volumes, from her awakening from being transformed into a fish to her rise in prestige and power among the aristocracy of Faerie to her enemies-to-lovers relationship (and marriage) to Tybalt, King of Cats. She’s impulsive, rebellious, insightful, and passionate, all things that Tybalt and her many friends love her for. If she has gained influential allies, she has also made even more powerful enemies. First on that list is Titania, and Titania is now out for revenge.

October wakes up one morning, content and unquestioning in her life as a changeling handmaid to her sister, as well as any other purebloods who feel like bossing her around. She’s not even entitled to defend herself, and the worst part is that she accepts all this as the natural, perfect order.

Then strangers who claim to know her begin to appear, and the edges of Titania’s bespelled paradise begin to unravel. Toby doesn’t know whom to trust, especially when her ability to work blood magic starts to free others from the enchantment. The only questions are whether this small band will be enough to overcome the stranglehold Titania has wrought over reality and if Toby will survive to see the end of it.

One of the challenges of a long-running series is the point where all the logical “next adventure” stories have been told but readers want more-more-more-of-the-same. One solution is to spin off other series featuring minor characters. McGuire has taken a different approach, which is to turn the reality of the original series inside-out, allowing the reader to become re-acquainted with central and minor characters as Toby figures out which is her real life, gathers a resistance force, and goes up against the Mother of Illusions, the Summer Queen herself. For those familiar with the series, it’s a grand reunion-with-a-twist. Therein lies much of its charm. The book has all the strengths of a well-developed world and beloved characters plus all the freshness of throwing the heroine into a snakepit of dangers unlike anything she has faced before.

On the other hand, this is not a suitable place to begin reading the series. Despite McGuire’s skillful weaving of reminders of backstory and showing who these people and their relationships are through their dialogue and action, thereby sidestepping the dreaded expository lump (pages and pages of text explaining everything that has come before, much to the boredom of the reader), there is simply too much material and too many characters from the previous 16 volumes. With that caveat, Sleep No More is a charming and ultimately moving addition to the series.

The Innocent Sleep, by Seanan McGuire (DAW)

Why stop at telling the same story in one novel when you can re-tell it a second time? Or, with October Daye, is it a case of “the more the merrier”? To begin with, I’m a huge fan of the series (and just about everything Seanan McGuire has written), but compared to the best, this re-telling falls flat. In the first novel, Sleep No More, Toby’s intrepid nature has been buried under a compliant second-class upbringing, one she accepts without question. WTF? This can’t be right! And it isn’t. Evil spells are afoot. Gradually, through one mishap after another, she realizes that she and everyone she knows have been living in a false reality created by Titania. Her blood magic, not to mention her gift for friendships and indomitable courage, allows her to restore memories of the real world, and in the end, she foils Titania’s plot to remake reality.  Along the way, she keeps encountering a smoldering, sullen, devastatingly handsome man who appears to be furious at her and who appears and disappears at seemingly random intervals. Only when she regains her true memories does she realize this is Tybalt, King of Cats, her husband, who has been doing his best to counter Titania’s spell without freaking Toby out too badly.

The Innocent Sleep is an attempt to tell the same story from Tybalt’s point of view. At the beginning, Toby’s gone missing, too much of the world doesn’t make sense, and people don’t remember Tybalt. It turns out that royal cats are immune to Titania’s spell, and to get them—and all magical cats—out of the way, she’s walled off the Shadow Roads on which they travel, thereby isolating the Courts of Cats. Only the royals can leave their Courts to hunt, and they quickly become exhausted from trying to feed the entire population. Before Tybalt can embark on a search for Toby, he has to take care of the other cats, providing one of the most entertaining sequences of the book. (He arranges a midnight raid of the local Costco, so delicious if you know Costco stores.) From there, the story alternates between backstage sequences of a plot we already know, Tybalt being forced to wait to take action, and characters explaining things that the reader already knows from the first book to one another.

With few exceptions (the Costco raid), The Innocent Sleep lacks the focus, dramatic tension, and self-discovery of the first book. I think this is because it isn’t Tybalt’s story, it’s Toby’s. In Sleep No More, Toby wrestles with a false reality in which she has the close, loving relationships with her family that she’s longed for, while on the run for her life and pitted against a powerful, relentless enemy. In this volume, Tybalt languishes in the shadows, and the reader learns about most of his emotions by being told what they are, not by experiencing them with him. The charismatic, dangerous, and often obsessed King of Cats from the early novels dissipates into a fairly bland, not very sexy character without much agency.

If you can’t get enough of October Daye, you’ll love this novel. If you’re looking for something fresh and compelling, better skip to the next one.