With Fate Conspire
Sep. 10th, 2012 15:55Brennan, Marie. With Fate Conspire. New York: Tor Books, 2011.
Disclaimer: the author is a friend of mine.
The final volume of the Onyx Court books shifts a lot of things radically. Whereas the struggle in previous books was to establish, and then to preserve, the Onyx Hall and its monarch(y), we learn quite quickly that in 1884 the Queen is vanished and the Onyx Hall is highly endangered by the construction of the Underground, specifically the Inner Circle. And though our previous protagonists have been fairy knights, queens, and divers humans of rank and breeding, our primary viewpoint characters in here are a skriker from Yorkshire and a London-born Irish serving-maid. Even the Prince of the Stone is a Cockney chimney-sweep by birth. Brennan talked a bit about her thought processes behind these reversals at the Big Idea.
I enjoyed the previous books in the series, and I enjoyed this one a lot too, though I wanted to spend more time with the engine of the eventual denouement than we did and I found myself thinking about![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
snarp's critique of Midnight Never Come, namely an alleged lack of bad consequences to characters for their actions. I don't, honestly, tend to think about things like that quite as much when I'm reading, since I rarely read for plot because I find most of them highly predictable (note, however, that in my own writing this is something I wrestle with), but I did find myself wondering, as I turned to the final of the book's three parts, whether things were a little too foreshadowed. (Or forelit, as the Ada Lovelace epigraph has it.) I'm not sure that they actually were, and again, this isn't something that bothers me too much; as before, I really enjoyed the integration of history and fantasy, as well as the presence of trains, because I love trains in fantasy books. I also really did like the concepts of the final denouement, and I also genuinely liked the two main characters, who do have a good deal of personality and grit. There was also a lot more interesting fairy science in this book, though as I said above, I wouldn't have minded even more of it.
Victorians + fairies could have been handled horribly, or stereotypically, and I really actually appreciated Brennan's choice to take the story to the sewers, gutters, workhouses and back alleys of the East End and Whitechapel, with a vengeance. I would read another London fairy book, but as it stands With Fate Conspire brings the series to a very thoughtful and very satisfying conclusion.
Disclaimer: the author is a friend of mine.
The final volume of the Onyx Court books shifts a lot of things radically. Whereas the struggle in previous books was to establish, and then to preserve, the Onyx Hall and its monarch(y), we learn quite quickly that in 1884 the Queen is vanished and the Onyx Hall is highly endangered by the construction of the Underground, specifically the Inner Circle. And though our previous protagonists have been fairy knights, queens, and divers humans of rank and breeding, our primary viewpoint characters in here are a skriker from Yorkshire and a London-born Irish serving-maid. Even the Prince of the Stone is a Cockney chimney-sweep by birth. Brennan talked a bit about her thought processes behind these reversals at the Big Idea.
I enjoyed the previous books in the series, and I enjoyed this one a lot too, though I wanted to spend more time with the engine of the eventual denouement than we did and I found myself thinking about
snarp's critique of Midnight Never Come, namely an alleged lack of bad consequences to characters for their actions. I don't, honestly, tend to think about things like that quite as much when I'm reading, since I rarely read for plot because I find most of them highly predictable (note, however, that in my own writing this is something I wrestle with), but I did find myself wondering, as I turned to the final of the book's three parts, whether things were a little too foreshadowed. (Or forelit, as the Ada Lovelace epigraph has it.) I'm not sure that they actually were, and again, this isn't something that bothers me too much; as before, I really enjoyed the integration of history and fantasy, as well as the presence of trains, because I love trains in fantasy books. I also really did like the concepts of the final denouement, and I also genuinely liked the two main characters, who do have a good deal of personality and grit. There was also a lot more interesting fairy science in this book, though as I said above, I wouldn't have minded even more of it. Victorians + fairies could have been handled horribly, or stereotypically, and I really actually appreciated Brennan's choice to take the story to the sewers, gutters, workhouses and back alleys of the East End and Whitechapel, with a vengeance. I would read another London fairy book, but as it stands With Fate Conspire brings the series to a very thoughtful and very satisfying conclusion.