The Brightest Fell

by Seanan McGuire

Cover image

Series: October Daye #11
Publisher: DAW
Copyright: 2017
ISBN: 0-698-18352-5
Format: Kindle
Pages: 353

Buy at Powell's Books

This is the eleventh book in the October Daye urban fantasy series, not counting various novellas and side stories. You really cannot start here, particularly given how many ties this book has to the rest of the series.

I would like to claim there's some sort of plan or strategy in how I read long series, but there are just a lot of books to read and then I get distracted and three years have gone by. The advantage of those pauses, at least for writing reviews, is that I return to the series with fresh eyes and more points of comparison. My first thought this time around was "oh, these books aren't that well written, are they," followed shortly thereafter by staying up past midnight reading just one more chapter.

Plot summaries are essentially impossible this deep into a series, when even the names of the involved characters can be a bit of a spoiler. What I can say is that we finally get the long-awaited confrontation between Toby and her mother, although it comes in an unexpected (and unsatisfying) form. This fills in a few of the gaps in Toby's childhood, although there's not much there we didn't already know. It fills in considerably more details about the rest of Toby's family, most notably her pure-blood sister.

The writing is indeed not great. This series is showing some of the signs I've seen in other authors (Mercedes Lackey, for instance) who wrote too many books per year to do each of them justice. I have complained before about McGuire's tendency to reuse the same basic plot structure, and this instance seemed particularly egregious. The book opens with Toby enjoying herself and her found family, feeling like they can finally relax. Then something horrible happens to people she cares about, forcing her to go solve the problem. This in theory requires her to work out some sort of puzzle, but in practice is fairly linear and obvious because, although I love Toby as a character, she can't puzzle her way out of a wet sack. Everything is (mostly) fixed in the end, but there's a high cost to pay, and everyone ends the book with more trauma.

The best books of this series are the ones where McGuire manages to break with this formula. This is not one of them. The plot is literally on magical rails, since The Brightest Fell skips even pretending that Toby is an actual detective (although it establishes that she's apparently still working as one in the human world, a detail that I find baffling) and gives her a plot compass that tells her where to go. I don't really mind this since I read this series for emotional catharsis rather than Toby's ingenuity, but alas that's mostly missing here as well. There is a resolution of sorts, but it's the partial and conditional kind that doesn't include awful people getting their just deserts.

This is also not a good series entry for world-building. McGuire has apparently been dropping hints for this plot back at least as far as Ashes of Honor. I like that sort of long-term texture to series like this, but the unfortunate impact on this book is a lot of revisiting of previous settings and very little in the way of new world-building. The bit with the pixies was very good; I wanted more of that, not the trip to an Ashes of Honor setting to pick up a loose end, or yet another significant scene in Borderland Books.

As an aside, I wish authors would not put real people into their books as characters, even when it's with permission as I'm sure it was here. It's understandable to write a prominent local business into a story as part of the local color (although even then I would rather it not be a significant setting in the story), but having the actual owner and staff show up, even in brief cameos, feels creepy and weird to me. It also comes with some serious risks because real people are not characters under the author's control. (All the content warnings for that link, which is a news story from three years after this book was published.)

So, with all those complaints, why did I stay up late reading just one more chapter? Part of the answer is that McGuire writes very grabby books, at least for me. Toby is a full-speed-ahead character who is constantly making things happen, and although the writing in this book had more than the usual amount of throat-clearing and rehashing of the same internal monologue, the plot still moved along at a reasonable clip. Another part of the answer is that I am all-in on these characters: I like them, I want them to be happy, and I want to know what's going to happen next. It helps that McGuire has slowly added characters over the course of a long series and given most of them a chance to shine. It helps even more that I like all of them as people, and I like the style of banter that McGuire writes. Also, significant screen time for the Luidaeg is never a bad thing.

I think this was the weakest entry in the series in a while. It wrapped up some loose ends that I wasn't that interested in wrapping up, introduced a new conflict that it doesn't resolve, spent a bunch of time with a highly unpleasant character I didn't enjoy reading about, didn't break much new world-building ground, and needed way more faerie court politics. But some of the banter was excellent, the pixies and the Luidaeg were great, and I still care a lot about these characters. I am definitely still reading.

Followed by Nights and Silences.

Continuing a pattern from Once Broken Faith, the ebook version of The Brightest Fell includes a bonus novella. (I'm not sure if it's also present in the print version.)

"Of Things Unknown": As is usual for the short fiction in this series, this is a side story from the perspective of someone other than Toby. In this case, that's April O'Leary, first introduced all the way back in A Local Habitation, and the novella focuses on loose ends from that novel. Loose ends are apparently the theme of this book.

This was... fine. I like April, I enjoyed reading a story from her perspective, and I'm always curious to see how Toby looks from the outside. I thought the plot was strained and the resolution a bit too easy and painless, and I was not entirely convinced by April's internal thought processes. It felt like McGuire left some potential for greater plot complications on the table here, and I found it hard to shake the impression that this story was patching an error that McGuire felt she'd made in the much earlier novel. But it was nice to have an unambiguously happy ending after the more conditional ending of the main story. (6)

Rating: 6 out of 10

Reviewed: 2022-01-15

Last spun 2022-02-06 from thread modified 2022-01-16