Chimes at Midnight by Seanan McGuire

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The previous entry in the series introduced us to the dangers of Goblin Fruit. It’s an intoxicant that blisses out purebloods, but leaves changelings and humans dangerously addicted (even after only one taste) until they die. This book is about October dealing with that threat to the non-pureblooded community in the San Francisco area. It quickly spirals out from there because, of course it does when October Daye is involved.

Ashes of Honor by Seanan McGuire

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

McGuire makes use of all we’ve learned about the fae and all the characters we’ve met to produce a great bit of detective fiction here. We also get some character growth for October. That’s always a great thing in a long-running series to keep it from getting boring.

I don’t want to ruin the plot so I’ll keep this short, but a couple little random notes:

In Sea-Salt Tears by by Seanan McGuire

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There’s a reason Seanan McGuire has stated that their preference for the reading order is published order. This story takes place before any of the other mainline books thus far, but it would be a spoiler for book 5 to read it before then.

McGuire knows how to write tragedy - it’s evident in the October Daye books and the Wayward children series. The world is an unforgiving place and the same is true in her books. They aren’t good books to escape the brutality of the world. But they ARE good books to empathize and sympathize with others who may be going through similar problems as you are. She writes universal themes through a fantasy lens and really brings the emotional response out of the reader.

Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear by Seanan McGuire

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The latest Wayward Children book gives us Nadya’s backstory. She was mostly a secondary character in the main series, but since she did get an ending in a prior book, it was nice to see her backstory. Well, I say “nice”, but as usual these stories are emotional roller coasters. Most kids don’t find a door if everything is perfectly awesome in their lives. As usual McGuire has cutting insight into the ways that adults can be cruel to children, often without realizing it.

It’s been a while since I posted a book review on here and rather than have a whole bunch of book review posts, I thought I’d collect the most recent ones into this post.

Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros

I listened to the audiobook, so, in all likelihood, I’m going to mispell everyone’s names

As I said with the first entry in this series, Yarros does a great job writing a compelling fantasy story. The romance is there, but it’s not what brings me into the story. We’ll get back to that momentarily. The best thing I could say about novel is that when I got to the end, I was upset that I have to wait until some time next year to continue the story. Yarros gives us a complete story (well, 2 of them - more on that as well) and does leave us with quite a compelling reason to come back, but even without the events of the last chapter, I would be there for the aftermath of the macro events of this book. If you need another reason to get into this book before I get to the details - there were multiple moments where Yarros had me reacting strongly to events in the book - like the precursor feeling to crying. Usually this involved Violet’s squad mates, but the penultimate chapter (not including Xaden’s epilogue) with the Sorengale family - I almost had to pull off the road for a moment.