Catchy Name Needed

(See here for a bit of background on this!)

Rosemary and Rue
by Seanan McGuire
published 2009 (note that there's a 2019 anniversary edition with some new material, which is what I've been using lately)

This is a plot summary plus commentary, basically. It started out as just notes for myself so it's not necessarily consistent in level of detail, etc.

Generally, these books are about a secret world of fairies (or fae) who live among us. (This pretty much explains itself as it goes.) They are set in and around San Francisco. There are currently 18 books so there's a lot of stuff to talk about if I'll stick with it!

This book starts on 6/9/1995 (for the prologue), and then skips to 2/23/2009 (which would have been more or less "present day" at the time it was published).


If you haven't read these books then be aware that there are definitely SPOILERS!!!!!
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
(just want to make that clear! - although I'll try to go easy on spoilers for later books in the series)

(Note that I'm putting new names - and species, etc -  in boldface the first time I use them.)



Prologue: In 1995, Toby (short for October) is working as a private investigator, and is trailing a fae named Simon, whose magic smells of smoke and rotten oranges - you don't need to memorize everyone's smell, just know that what fae & part-fae people smell like is important, in this tale. (Think of it as sort of a signature thing - everyone smells a little different, and people who are related by blood generally have similar scents.) She trails Simon to Golden Gate Park, where he meets a woman named Oleander - who's 900 years old, Toby says, but still looks like a teenager. There, Simon turns Toby into a fish (a koi, specifically), and kicks her into a fish-pond. And she stays there, in fish form, for fourteen years. She snaps out of it, suddenly, in June 2009.

Chapter 1 picks up six months later. Toby is working as a checker at a Safeway near downtown SF. The first customer we see her checking out is someone we later learn is called the Luidaeg, but Toby doesn't know her yet, at this point. (She is buying gourmet ice cream and Diet Coke.) In between customers, there's some backstory: Toby's parents were a fairy woman and an Irish accountant, so T. is half-fae, a changeling in this book's terminology. The second customer we see is a childhood friend named Mitch, and this is not a coincidence: her old friends keep trying to draw her back into their circle, but she's pushing them away.

On her way home from work she sees a kelpie, a fairy horse; she also talks about how everybody tells her her name is weird - and I'm guessing that would happen a lot when you're a supermarket checker named "October" - even in San Francisco. - It's almost dawn, and dawn strips away fae illusions. (Very uncomfortable for somebody like Toby whose magic is weak.) She meets Tybalt, King of Cats (currently in human form), who seems to make a specialty of tormenting her. He calls her "little fish," mockingly. (When he changes to cat-form, he seems to fold inward, and there's a popping noise and the smell of his magic - and then he's a tabby cat.)

Chapter 2
When she gets home to her apartment, there's a teenage boy slouching in the doorway - I believe we'll learn later that he's called Quentin, although he's not named here. (Pale-blond hair, Canadian accent, so yes.) He calls her "Lady Daye" but she says it was "Sir Daye" when it was anything. Quentin works for Sylvester, who a duke and is Toby's "liege," in the medievalist terms the fae use, but the message he gives her is not phrased as a direct order, so she ignores it and goes to bed.

She dreams about her mother, Amandine, playing "fairy bride" with Toby's human father. Toby was born in 1952, making her 57 here. (She is not immortal, but even changelings live much longer than a regular human. The books never really discuss how old Toby appears to be, but clearly it's much younger than she actually is.)

Fae children are protected by "baby magic" which keeps small children from giving themselves away - but at some point it fails, and then a changeling is given a choice of whether to be fae or human - this is called the Changeling's Choice. It was Sylvester who came to give "the Choice" to Toby, who was 7 at the time. She said, "I'm like Mommy," and they pulled both her and her mother through to the Summerlands (part of Faerie) and burned down the house so that her father would think they both died. Toby's mother didn't want to go back to the Summerlands, and she blamed Toby. She was happy playing fairy bride. (Note that if the child chooses to be human, they are killed, to prevent them from revealing the existence of Faerie. So not really much of a choice.)

Toby dreams about being a fish. She says sunlight hurt, even as a fish, and maybe that helped her remember that something was wrong, that she wasn't really supposed to be a fish. The spell gave way at dawn one morning, just over 14 years after it was cast. (7 is a magic number, and 14 is 7x2, after all, maybe that's significant? I don't know.) The pond she had been imprisoned in was just outside the Tea Gardens, which in this world is a knowe (a "hollow hill") maintained by a water-fae named Lily, who knows Toby. She stumbled naked in that direction, not really understanding what was happening, and Lily must've been there, Toby assumes, because someone cast a spell on her so that she looked human by the time the police got there.

It took her a while to understand how much time had gone by. The police think she was kidnapped. Toby obviously can't tell them about how she was a fish, so she falls back on "I don't remember" instead. And she's devastated. She had a fiance and a small daughter, who's now a teenager. They think she abandoned them, and naturally she can't tell them the truth either.

It was another fae noble, a woman named Evening, who picked up the pieces of Toby, found her a place to stay, tried to help her get her PI license back, etc. It's important to know this because...

Chapter 3
Later on, when Toby wakes up, there's a series of phone messages from Evening - they start with "Pick up, dammit," and go downhill from there. The last message is a spell, a binding. Toby must investigate Evening's death (even though Evening's clearly alive and talking as the spell is cast) or Toby will die, too.

Chapter 4
Toby goes to Evening's condo - a very expensive place. The police are there. Since Evening is a pureblood fae, the body the police have found won't actually be hers. Fae bodies don't decay, so to hide this, there are creatures called night-haunts, whose job is to come to the scene of fae deaths - they eat the actual body and put a simulacrum in its place, which looks exactly like the deceased, but behaves as a human body would. This is one of the workarounds that fae culture has developed to avoid being found out.

Chapter 5
Toby finds evidence that Evening was killed by iron bullets and a knife. She realizes that she needs to go to the local queen with the news; Evening was a countess, and the fae have customs for this. The Queen of the Mists rules Northern California, as she has since 1906, when her father died in the great earthquake. (There was apparently some doubt about this at the time, but Evening helped the new queen get established.) The queen has no name (which is why you will see me refer to her as NQ, for Nameless Queen). She hates changelings, and Toby more than most, because Toby was too successful, and because Sylvester forced the Queen to knight her - thus she is officially "Sir Daye."

The royal knowe is on the beach in San Francisco. The Queen knows she's coming - although not why - and she changes Toby's jeans into a ballgown before she ever gets inside. Toby says her ritual piece ("Evening has stopped her dancing") and the Queen is shocked and then angry.

(I was thinking about why NQ would be so angry - I don't think she and Evening were buddies - and it occurred to me that maybe she was somehow dependent on Evening for something other than just getting her on the throne in the first place. I don't know what that would mean exactly, but it does make sense.)

Anyway, she refuses Toby any help, and Toby runs away - because the Queen is dangerous when she's angry. She is part Banshee and she can actually kill with her voice.

Part 2 is here.

I have a new t-shirt that looks like this icon, more or less, on a black background. Since I have to work tomorrow, I'm wearing it to work. (I don't really watch football any more, except the occasional Texas game. I did watch the entire UT-Bama game, which they should have won.)

(there may possibly be some spoilers below!)

I realized I haven't posted here in ages - since May, apparently - so I did that thing I always do, I went through my planner and checked to see what movies we've seen. Rob's been to nearly as many movies without me as he has with me. (I usually check mid-week to see what's being released, and if there's nothing I want to see, then I check for a horror movie for him to see, in which case I generally just stay home and read while he's gone.) So here's the updated list. I'm pretty faithful now about putting movies into my planner, but before I got methodical about that, well, I wouldn't even know what we'd seen years ago if it wasn't for Dreamwidth and Livejournal.

Everybody should go see The Woman King, it's awesome. I think Rob would say of his horror movies, he recommends The Black Phone and (for some reason) Orphan: First Kill. Oh, and we also both really liked Nope. I wouldn't go at first and then I figured out it was more of an alien movie than a horror one - although it has its horrible moments - and I gave in. I also liked the Dr Strange movie a lot (Thor, not so much).

We've watched the hell out of Disney+, of course - Obi-Wan & now Andor, She-Hulk and so forth. I wake up and find Rob watching the weirdest things - I'm pretty sure he watched the entire run of Adam-12 over the summer. (He said it stayed pretty good right up until the very last season, when it finally started going seriously downhill.) Oh, and of course we're watching The Rings of Power - I like it but can't say I really love it, so far. It did cause me to go pull out my copy of Fellowship and start looking things up in the appendices, I admit.

(I just re-read The Golden Compass series lately and started on The Book of Dust. I'm really wanting to go subscribe to HBOMax for a while so I can watch that series. Plus apparently they have the entire Studio Ghibli output, which is a draw!)

Movies seen in a theater in 2022 (finally updated!):

1. The Woman King
2. Nope
3. Kiki's Delivery Service (Ghiblifest) (Rob had never seen this one, apparently)
4. Thor: Love & Thunder
5. Dr Strange & the Multiverse of Madness
6. The Northman
7. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
8. Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore
9. Everything Everywhere All At Once
10. The Batman (twice)
11. Cyrano
12. Belfast
13. Spider-Man: No Way Home (our third time seeing it)
14. Ghostbusters: Afterlife (our second time seeing it) 

...and Rob also saw:

• Pearl (which is a sequel prequel to X, below)
• Barbarian
• Orphan: First Kill (twice)
• Beast
• Nope (without me, then later on with me!)
• The Black Phone
• The Thing (40th anniversary re-release)
• Men
• X
• The Cursed
• Scream