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wardenred's review against another edition
adventurous
informative
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
Coffee and corpses, that’s my life.
I'll be honest: it's a miracle I actually went on with the October Daye series past this book the first time around, because the first time I read A Local Habitation, I really disliked it. To the point that apparently I either evicted it from memory or maybe I was just skimming more than reading. Because early into this re-read I realized I've forgotten enormous chunks of the story. How the mystery gets resolved. Half the character cast. The entire night-haunt plotline (how on earth). The degree of Tybalt's involvement. Most of the story, really.
I guess that's part of what made the book infinitely more exciting during a re-read. Some of the time, I recognized the characters (mostly from later books), some of the time, I had no idea what was going on, sometimes random details sprung up, sometimes I just had to guess at everything anew. That felt like solving a puzzle in a dark room, which can be a rather engrossing feeling. I also loved spotting all the random bits and pieces of foreshadowing, which are plentiful here. Some lines are downright hilarious in hindsight, knowing some of the future reveals. Some are way more ominous than I must have thought them to be originally. Some are foreshadowing for stuff I haven't caught up with yet, but armed with all my existing knowledge of the Tobyverse, I'm pretty damn sure they're foreshadowing. So that was fun.
What wasn't fun was the plot itself—I can sure tell why I struggled with it years ago. On the surface, it looks like a promising locked room mystery, but the problem is, no one is actually solving it. People don't do anything that would be sensible to do when you know one of you is the killer, such as sticking together and policing each other as a group. Toby just keeps meandering back and forth determined not to connect a single dot. Like, the entire (somewhat annoying) plotline with Alex, it was rather clear from the start and driven home when his sister chatted to Quentin, but it took Toby almost the entire damn book and Connor's on-page presence to realize something. The entire mystery and the road map to solving it was essentially spoiled/prophecied by Luidaeg before Toby even set out on the road to Tamed Lightning. Etc, etc. I mean, investigation has never been Toby's strength, she's more about confronting things head-on and getting stabbed a lot, but I feel like her detective skills were possibly at their all-time lowest here.
This is an interesting book in the context of the entire series, because it does a lot of heavy lifting laying out the groundwork for Big Important Things down the line, introduces lots of characters and concepts, pushes forward personal arcs and the like. However, as a self-contained novel, it's quite possibly the weakest in the series. I did enjoy my time re-reading it, but only because of all the re-read-related factors.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Blood and Death
Moderate: Sexual harassment
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