mellicious | Entries tagged with fantasy

(I decided the trees icon was about as fairy-like as anything I had either here or on the old Livejournal - I had a lot more icons there, back in the day, and they're still there so I go crib from there occasionally - so that's what I'm using for these entries, assuming I remember!)

Part 1 is here, and this starts with chapter 6 of Rosemary and Rue.
Again: SPOILERS!

Chapter 6 picks up with Toby reviewing her options after leaving the Queen's knowe. Obviously the Queen has no intention of getting involved. Other courts are equally dangerous. It's not a mortal problem - the police already have the murder case but they have no clue what's actually going on. She doesn't want to go to Sylvester, her duke, or at least not yet, although she knows she'll have to eventually. There are other fae: the Luidaeg; Lily from the Tea Gardens - but she eliminates those too. The only other thing she can come up with is a place and a person from her past: the place is called "Home" and the person is an underworld figure named Devin, the sort of guy who takes in teen changelings and uses them for "favors." (It says a lot about Toby's state of mind to me that she thinks this is her best option.) She was one of Devin's kids, once, but since her mother is a sort of fae celebrity, she got treated somewhat better than most. She was "his lover and his pet and his favorite toy," she says. Sylvester eventually got her out of that life, and she's barely seen Devin since.

Chapter 7 - "Home" itself is a sort of dive where Devin and a bunch of teenage changelings live like Lost Boys (and Girls). Toby immediately gets into a squabble with a couple of kids in the front room: siblings, Manuel & Dare; they are Tylwyth Teg/Piskie quarter-bloods. Apparently in the years while Toby was a fish, the Queen tried to shut Home down, but Evening stopped her. This surprises Toby; she would've thought Evening would consider the place beneath her. Toby also reminisces about how she thought she was in love with Devin at one point, and he persuaded her to promise him that she wouldn't marry her (now ex-)fiance until their daughter Gillian was old enough to make her Choice or she turned 13 (which strikes me as creepily specific). Now Devin wants her to back off the investigation - but she doesn't tell him about the binding, so he doesn't know she has no choice about it. He agrees to help, but not for free, naturally. The form of payment is left unspecified.

Chapter 8 - When Toby gets back to her car, she hears a noise and finds that it's a rose-goblin, a sort of cat-shaped fae creature that's actually an animate rosebush, thorns and all. It's carrying a key on a string - one that she's seen before, when she tasted Evening's blood. (Oh yeah, I wasn't being super-specific in the last entry and I didn't mention that part. Let's just say that Toby can get information by tasting blood - icky but useful, I guess!) While puzzling over the key, T. talks about how the number 3 is sacred in Faerie: 3 courts, 3 rulers, all that. There's a saying that there are three roads to every destination: the easy way, the hard way, and the long way - and Evening had a business called Third Road Enterprises, probably referencing that saying. Toby decides she needs to go take a look at Evening's offices.

Chapter 9 - What Toby finds in Evening's office suite (hidden in a file cabinet) is a very rare magical object: a "hope chest." There were once said to be 12 of them, made by Oberon himself, and they can supposedly change the balance of a person's blood, and make them completely human or completely fae. (You can see why that would be tempting for a half-fae like Toby.) She isn't really sure she believes this, but she also thinks "you can trust the ones you hate" - meaning Evening, I guess! (She and E. were more frenemies than real friends.) Something whispers in the back of her head, maybe from Evening's memories: The key will open the way in Goldengreen (which is Evening's own knowe). So that's probably another place she needs to go.

So, in chapter 10, she takes the hope chest to Tybalt, because he's a pureblood and won't be tempted by it, and as a Cait Sidhe, he's not a subject of the Queen. He's not happy about taking it, but he promises to keep it safe, in a binding way - and this is not something I'd ever particularly paid attention to before, but I went back and wrote down the words of the binding:
Tybalt says:

By root and branch, by leaf and vine, on rowan and oak and ash and thorn, I swear that what is given to my keeping shall remain in my keeping, and shall be given over only to the one who holds my bond. My blood to the defense of the task I am set, my heart to the keeping of the promise to which I am bound.

and Toby responds:

Broken promises are the road to our damnation. Promises kept are the meeting of all our myriad roads. And such a meeting will my promise be.

(Or maybe both of them say that last bit. It's unclear.)

(I can't say anything about why I think that's important without getting all spoilery, but people who've read further into the series will surely understand!)

Part 3 is here. (I guess I'm going to have to do an index eventually, but if I do I'll go back and add links!)

(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 was poking around on Prime looking for, I don't know, a Christmas movie or something, and I ended up watching The Spiderwick Chronicles - which I know we saw back in the day, but nobody else we knew ever seemed to have seen. I didn't actually know I was hitting play on the movie at all just now, I thought maybe they made a TV series or something (they are, see below), but no, this is the movie.

We really liked it at the time, I remembered that, but it was one of those movies that vanished into the ether, as movies that don't make money tend to, and I almost forgot it existed. But, y'know, kids' movies have a way of persisting, if they find an audience, and here it is. (It's funny that I was talking yesterday about the Johnny Depp Wonka movie - which I couldn't honestly have told you the name of even though it's the name of the book - and here's Freddie Highmore, the same kid who played Charlie in that.) The animation shows its age, but it's not bad for something made 15 years ago.

(Later) Ah, ok, I knew I'd heard something about a series. Disney+ ditched it just recently and now it's going to be on Roku. I'm glad to know I wasn't imagining that.

We went to see Spider-man:NWH and despite me saying a day or two ago that I don't identify with Peter Parker, I really liked it. I'm not going to say any more about it right now, though. (Tom Holland is pretty much grown-up now, even if Peter Parker's not, quite, so that may have helped.)

I started reading that book I was talking about before, In a Holidaze, and it turns out that it starts on December 26th - so it's really a post-Christmas book -- unless it goes on until the next Christmas, or something (which is possible, I don't know.) Anyway, I decided I would be better served to read the other contemporary holiday romance I bought (Sleigh Bells Ring, I think it was) now and save that other one til later. (And I've got more of those Regency Christmas things to get through, too.)

I finally finished another book I've been reading and that's called A Dance with the Fae Prince. I liked it. I have a definite weakness for stuff about elves and fairies. It's a sequel in an indirect way to a book called A Deal with the Elf King, which I also liked, but I felt like this second one was written with more assurance, somehow. It has a pretty twisty plot and I never quite figured out where it was going until it got there - always nice. (The heroine had a mysterious mother who died long ago, and I was sure that was going to figure into it eventually, but I never quite figured out how it was going to work out until right at the end.)

I had been working on a paper list of all my books, but then I didn't keep very good track of what I sent to Goodwill lately (because we did a big cleaning/de-hoarding project this fall). While that was going on, I also read some books that were paperbacks in bad shape and those I just tore up as I went, so I wouldn't be tempted to keep them. I have a ton of books on the Kindle and I'm trying to shift even more to that, just so I won't be destashing books I really would otherwise want to keep. I have books I've bought three or four times because I threw the previous copy out, or took it to Goodwill. I like reading on the Kindle just as well as paper, or really, even better, and they don't take up any space. (I am not giving up on the paper book-list but I think a spreadsheet is also in order, so it can be re-sorted at need!)

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Rosemary and Rue (October Daye book 1, part 2)
Rosemary and Rue - October Daye book 1, part 1
Spiderwick Chronicles
In a Holidaze

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Entries tagged with fantasy

Rosemary and Rue (October Daye book 1, part 2)

Rosemary and Rue - October Daye book 1, part 1

Spiderwick Chronicles

In a Holidaze