#A Killing Frost by Seanan McGuire

[quirkycatsfatstacks]

WOTN: A Killing Frost by Seanan McGuire

Fae Laws And Complications Abound in A Killing Frost A Killing Frost is the latest novel to come from the October Daye series. Once again, fae law is making Toby’s life difficult. You think being a hero would earn her a break or two, but that is not the case. Can you believe that October Daye is fourteen books in at this point? In many ways, it still feels like the series is brand new. Probably…

[quietflorilegium]

“Love can’t always save you, but love should always try to guide you home.”

Tybalt, Seanan McGuire, "A Killing Frost"

[book-quotes-and-moodboards]

Life went on. In the face of heroes and villains, gods and monsters, life went on, and I didn’t get to opt out of the hard parts unless I wanted to risk losing the pieces of it that really, truly mattered.

A Killing Frost (by Seanan McGuire)

[living400lbs]

“I think Toby’s allergic to subtle,” said Quentin. “It makes her break out in hives or something. There’s not another good explanation for why she is the way she is.”

“Quiet, you,” I said. “We’re in mortal danger right now. This isn’t the time to be mean to me.”

“We’re pretty much always in mortal danger. When is the time to be mean to you?”

“How about next Tuesday?”

- from A Killing Frost by Seanan McGuire

[geraniums-red]

Seanan McGuire - A Killing Frost

Book 14 in the October Daye series

This book has one of the more convoluted quest motivations in the series so far. Toby wants to get married. In order to do so, she needs to invite Simon Torquill, who is her legal father in Faerie terms, and if she doesn't invite him she risks someone claiming offence against her on his behalf. And Simon is currently 'unable to find his way home' as a result of a spell of the Luidaeg's, so may be unable to answer a wedding invitation even if they can find him.

It was enjoyable enough, but not one of my favourites. Toby was rushing about without planning ahead in a way that I thought she'd grown out of. I'm a bit worried about how much of what Simon learned via Toby's blood would have gone direct to Evening due to the depth of the influence she had on him. Finding Oberon was a bit anti-climactic (I was expecting there to be a whole book just about looking for him), but I guess it does explain how they could make a police officer vanish for several years and not have any consequences. And the divorce / wedding at the end was quite sweet, and I think everyone will be much happier as a result (apart from Amandine and I'm not particularly concerned with Amandine's happiness).

The bonus novella Shine in Pearl is a prequel looking at the early relationships between Simon, Patrick and Dianda. The ending is a little sad, and I wanted one more chapter to bring it up-to-date with the events in A Killing Frost and back to a happy place again.

[accidentalspaceexplorer]

April Monthly Recap

(So it turns out I wrote this and completely forgot to post it...whoops!) April was pretty successful - I read a lot of books I enjoyed, and I completed my calling in the Magical Readathon. My favorites this month were all sequels, in either the Kushiel's Dart universe or in the Toby Daye universe. (My month was 63% sequels!) My least favorite was Air Awakens, which I DNF'd pretty early on.

A Morbid Taste for Bones by Ellis Peters: 4.75/5

Emergent Properties by Aimee Ogden: 4.5/5

The Marquis Who Mustn't by Courtney Milan: 4.5/5

Read It and Weep by Jenn McKinlay: 3.75/5

Kushiel's Scion by Jacqueline Carey: 5/5

Kushiel's Justice by Jacqueline Carey: 5/5

The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter by Theodora Goss: 2/5, dnf

Air Awakens by Elise Kova: 1.5/5, dnf

Games of Command by Linnea Sinclair: 3/5

Chimes at Midnight by Seanan McGuire: 5/5

The Winter Long by Seanan McGuire: 5/5

A Red-Rose Chain by Seanan McGuire: 5/5

Once Broken Faith by Seanan McGuire: 5/5

The Brightest Fell by Seanan McGuire: 5/5

Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany: 2.5/5, book club

Mislaid in Parts Half-Known by Seanan McGuire: 4.25/5

Night and Silence by Seanan McGuire: 5/5

The Unkindest Tide by Seanan McGuire: 4.75/5

A Killing Frost by Seanan McGuire: 4.75/5

The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles by Malka Older: 4/5

When Sorrows Come by Seanan McGuire: 5/5

Be the Serpent by Seanan McGuire: 5/5

Sleep No More by Seanan McGuire: 5/5

The Bridge Kingdom by Danielle L. Jensen: 4/5

Can You Keep a Secret? by Sophie Kinsella: 3/5

That Time I Got Drunk and Saved a Demon by Kimberly Lemming: 2.5/5

Honey & Spice by Bolu Babalola: 4.25/5

Goals below the cut:

Complete series: +1 for the year! (started 2, caught up on 3)

Catch up on backlists: 22 (+1, although if I added Seanan McGuire to the list which I very well might do then it'll be +11 more lol)

Read FIYAH/Nebula/Hugo finalists & awards: 3 book (+2)

Read down TBR: (hard to tell what it was at the beginning of the year, but in August it was 1332) at end of April it's 1460 (still getting bigger...)

Read old top-of-TBR list: 1 (+1)

[lesenbyan]

'Ight, Jayden's Complete List of Books taken from my Libby app. All of these were listened to as audiobooks and thus are available as such.

Feel free to ask about them! I'll give summaries trigger warnings (that I remember) rate it and maybe tell you a fun fact I love or a favorite character

* is for a series that continues further than I read

+ is for an ongoing/incomplete series

[Explicit] is for detailed sex scenes; assume all books here swear

The Unwanteds - Lisa McMann *

Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells (x3) +

All Systems Red

Artificial Condition

Rogue Protocol

Exit Strategy

Fugitive Telemetry

Network Effect

Wayward Children - Seanan McGuire +

Every Heart a Doorway

Down Among the Sticks and Bones

Beneath the Sugar Sky

In an Absent Dream

Come Tumbling Down

Across the Green Grass Fields

Where the Drowned Girls Go

The Mercy Thompson Series - Parricia Briggs * +

Moon Called

Blood Bound

Iron Kissed

Bone Crossed

Silver Borne

River Marked

Frost Burned

The Anita Blake Series - Laurel K Hamilton * + [Explicit]

Guilty Pleasures

The Laughing Corpse

Circus of the Damned

The Lunatic Café

Bloody Bones

The Killing Dance

Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman

The Ocean at the End of the Lane - Neil Gaiman

Norse Mythology - Neil Gaiman

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo - Taylor Jenkins Reid

Fractured Fables - Alix E Harrow

A Spindle Splintered

A Mirror Mended

Broken Earth Trilogy - N K Jemisin

Under the Whispering Door - TJ Klune

The House in the Cerulean Sea - TJ Klune

Fifth Season

Obelisk Gate

The Stone Sky

Less - Andrew Sean Greer

One Last Stop - Casey McQuiston

Detransition, Baby - Torrey Peters

Sofi and the Bone Song - Adrienne Tooley

So This is Ever After - F. T. Lukens

Gideon the Ninth - Tasmyn Muir *

How to be Perfect - Micheal Schur

The Watchmaker's Daughter - C J Archer *

Cackle - Rachel Harrison

The Burning Girls - C J Tudor

Plain Bad Heroines - Emily M Danforth

Nettle and Bone - T Kingfisher

The Hollow Places - T Kingfisher

The Book of Tea - Judy I Lin

A Magic Steeped in Poison

A Venom Dark and Sweet

Only A Monster - Vanessa Len +

What Moves The Dead - T Kingfisher

Malice Duology - Heather Walter

Malice

Misrule

This Vicious Grace - Emily Thiede +

Once Upon a Broken Heart Series - Stephanie Garber +

Once Upon a Broken Heart

The Ballad of Never After

The Art of Memoir - Mary Karr

The Storyteller - Dave Grohl

When Breath Becomes Air - Paul Kalanithi

The Princess Saves Herself in This One - Amanda Lovelace

The Witch Doesn't Burn in This One - Amanda Lovelace

The Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins

Hunger Games

Catching Fire

Mockingjay

[magiccarpetman]

“Got it." I looked past him to Danny.

"Can you hang around campus until May's awake and then give her a ride home?"

"I was already planning on it," he said.

"I'll put a pot of coffee on." Danny won't let me pay him for driving, citing a favor I did for his sister almost twenty years ago as a debt that he's still trying to pay off. I don't actually remember what I did for her that was so impressive, but at this point, if anyone's in debt, it's me.

Coffee was the least that I could do.

—A Killing Frost by Seanan McGuire

Spotted this passage on reread and oof! Definitely joining the “there’s something weird about Danny” club.

[reviewsthatburn]

As the sixteenth book in a long-running series, BE THE SERPENT represents a new status quo. The change from Simon as a villain to someone in the process of healing was teased in NIGHT AND SILENCE, established in A KILLING FROST, doubled down upon in various short stories, and confirmed in WHEN SORROWS COME during Toby's wedding. This span also is responsible for Rayseline Torquill's current condition and the request which kicks off BE THE SERPENT. Her elf-shot slumber and former misdeeds need to be addressed in a way that leaves her room to get better now that her blood is no longer fighting within her. Once that's addressed, there's a new storyline which, while some aspects of it were teased in the previous several books, has its inciting incident within these pages. The main storyline features several things which are introduced and resolved, plus a very stressful cliffhanger and final pages which promise a very interesting start to the next book. This is definitely not the end of the series, and it explicitly leaves several things (beyond the cliffhanger) which future books will need to address.

Full review at link.

[meadowziplines]

BE THE SERPENT COVER DROPPED

-incoherent screaming-

(Seanan confirms in Twitter thread that it is Simon behind Toby)

The Toby Daye discord has had a TIME with this, let me tell you (will post some of my own thoughts later that aren't just SCREAMING)

[darkfrog24]

DIANDA: Sorry about your legal problems, Toby. If your quest doesn't work out, you can always get married the Saltmist way.

OCTOBER: Is that when you punch anyone who says my wedding's not legit?

DIANDA: I PUNCH ANYONE WHO SAYS YOUR WEDDING'S NOT LEGIT.

[mari-buginette]

When you like an author's work so much that you'll read a genre you normally dislike, or go to the Aquarium /Zoo and get excited about "Frogs for Seanan!", when you weren't fond of frogs.

[quietflorilegium]

“No one can make you feel small and judged like the people who loved you as a child.”

Seanan McGuire, "A Killing Frost"

[book-quotes-and-moodboards]

That’s mortal magic. They patch the holes in the world with words, and sometimes those words can hold long after the truth has worn away.

A Killing Frost (by Seanan McGuire)

[living400lbs]

What Toby's built to do

Spoilers for A Killing Frost and later

"Look at the little hero, Dad, and tell me what her line was built to do," said the Luidaeg. [...] "Don't break her," chided the Luidaeg.

Oberon frowned. "The blood is there - a living hope chest, to replace what has been broken. An instinctive understanding of the balances and interactions between our different strains, necessary for the doing of what's she's made to do. Sensitivity to magic. More than I would have thought advisable."

"Because it isn't," said the Luidaeg. "When she was younger, I used to worry she'd walk into an illusion and have a stroke where she stood. It's too much for one line to carry, but it's hers, and has to contend with it. Look deeper."

It felt like telling him not to break me and then to look deeper in the same breath was a contradiction, but I couldn't say anything. [....]

"No more illusions than the least of us, so no flowers, and little connection to the water - all she has is the blood," said Oberon. He had the audacity to sound surprised about that, as if somehow I should have picked up magic from the Queens, even though they had no part of my family tree. "But the blood she has is more than sufficient to break the world. Is this . . . Can she truly unravel another's working as the blood implies?"

The Luidaeg looked almost smug. "She can," she said. "I've seen her do it. [...] She finds the rough spots in the spell, digs her hands in, and pulls it apart," said the Luidaeg. "I've seen her tackle things that should have been infinitely too big for her to handle. Hell, she reversed a full Actaeon. On herself."

From Be The Serpent by Seanan McGuire

[powersandplanetaries]

I'm finally sitting down with the newest Toby Daye book and I've made a Bingo sheet. Wish me luck, and no spoilers!