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futuriana 's review for:
Rosemary and Rue
by Seanan McGuire
At thirty pages I wrote; "So far I'm having a hard time warming up to the protagonist. And while things have happened (mostly in pre-novel history) she doesn't seem to have done much herself so far."
And at the end;
It never really picked up, Toby got knocked about a lot and spent a fair bit of time unconscious before finally doing something useful(something which she had thought about doing 200 pages earlier) in the last twenty or so pages, and that resolved the plot.
Aside from that: wt could have been fun that Toby is such an very unrealiable narrator in her perspectives of just about every single person she interacts with, it mostly made her seem unsuited for the role of detective, and her description and interaction of one character (spoilers, I guess) was very confusing, she seems to describe him as abusive, dangerous and controlling, and a few pages later as harmless, his only power lying in being thought of as dangerous. Then it flips back again.
I know this series is quite popular, so it may be that this book is all setup. There was a lot of explaining of who everyone was, what their relationships to and history with each other where and how the world of the fairy worked. Unfortunately there was a also lot of simultaneous showing and telling done. I often feel like modern novels can get a little bloated, and this is another case where just tightening the narration (Toby seems to comment, explain or elaborate on everything she says or does, doubling each paragraph) might have made a solid novella.
I had read this mainly because the author is local and I love seeing what genre authors do with the city. But while the Fae world clearly had some thought put into it, I felt like the San Francisco setting was extremely generic. To the point where almost no neighborhood or street names are ever mentioned, Toby gets on 'a San Francisco bus' instead of 'Muni' or the '38 Geary', one location is the 'San Francisco Museum of Art', so the sense of place is vague at best.
And at the end;
It never really picked up, Toby got knocked about a lot and spent a fair bit of time unconscious before finally doing something useful(something which she had thought about doing 200 pages earlier) in the last twenty or so pages, and that resolved the plot.
Aside from that: wt could have been fun that Toby is such an very unrealiable narrator in her perspectives of just about every single person she interacts with, it mostly made her seem unsuited for the role of detective, and her description and interaction of one character (spoilers, I guess) was very confusing, she seems to describe him as abusive, dangerous and controlling, and a few pages later as harmless, his only power lying in being thought of as dangerous. Then it flips back again.
I know this series is quite popular, so it may be that this book is all setup. There was a lot of explaining of who everyone was, what their relationships to and history with each other where and how the world of the fairy worked. Unfortunately there was a also lot of simultaneous showing and telling done. I often feel like modern novels can get a little bloated, and this is another case where just tightening the narration (Toby seems to comment, explain or elaborate on everything she says or does, doubling each paragraph) might have made a solid novella.
I had read this mainly because the author is local and I love seeing what genre authors do with the city. But while the Fae world clearly had some thought put into it, I felt like the San Francisco setting was extremely generic. To the point where almost no neighborhood or street names are ever mentioned, Toby gets on 'a San Francisco bus' instead of 'Muni' or the '38 Geary', one location is the 'San Francisco Museum of Art', so the sense of place is vague at best.