Bea Reviews The Brightest Fell by Seanan McGuire with an Excerpt

Series: October Daye #11
Publisher: DAW
Source: the publisher in exchange for an honest review
Release Date: September 5th, 2017 
Buying Links: Amazon* | Book Depository* | iTunes* | Barnes & Noble
* affiliate links; the blog receives a small commission from purchases made through these links.

Blurb from goodreads:

For once, everything in October “Toby” Daye’s life seems to be going right. There have been no murders or declarations of war for her to deal with, and apart from the looming specter of her Fetch planning her bachelorette party, she’s had no real problems for days. Maybe things are getting better.

Maybe not.

Because suddenly Toby’s mother, Amandine the Liar, appears on her doorstep and demands that Toby find her missing sister, August. But August has been missing for over a hundred years and there are no leads to follow. And Toby really doesn’t owe her mother any favors.

Then Amandine starts taking hostages, and refusal ceases to be an option.

My Thoughts:

"For once, everything in October “Toby” Daye’s life seems to be going right." - I knew that wasn't going to last. Poor Toby rarely catches a break. Besides, it would be a short book if there wasn't a conflict or catastrophe. :D The book opens with Toby's bachelorette party which was a hoot to read. But, In no time, Amandine shows up on Toby's doorstep and makes a request/demand. And oh boy, Amandine plays dirty. She is not nice. I didn't remember her being quite so cold or vicious in her earlier appearances. In "The Brightest Fell", she is queen bee bi*** and delights in rubbing Toby's face in it.

One again, McGuire pulls threads from earlier stories and weaves them into a new design, making you question what you believed and what you thought you knew. She even did something I thought was nearly impossible: she made me like, and feel sorry for, Simon Torquill. She started on that in the prior book but brought it to fruition in this book. Mind you, I still disagree with his choices but I understand them better now. Much of the book revolves around family, the family we're born with and the family we make for ourselves. McGuire examines these ties and shows us just how binding they can be, even when we want to turn our back and walk away.

Certain characters were missing and others had reduced roles and were missed, but McGuire worked magic with the remaining ones. The story was tight, the characterizations excellent and I was veering between crying and cheering with the occasional urge to pith my Kindle across the room. Toby goes right to her breaking point and I was seriously worried about her future. McGuire is evil; she needs to stop beating up and Toby and the gang! I know I'm being vague but so much happens and I really don't want to accidentally spoil anything. "The Brightest Fell" is a strong wrenching story, with twists and turns, pathos, humor, love, anger, and moments that made me gasp, curse, and read furiously. If you're new to the series, skip this book and get the first book, "Rosemary and Rue". This series simply must be read in order. You won't regret it.

Come back on September 7th for Laura's review and a giveaway.

Reviews of previous books in the series:
Book 4, Late Eclipses
Book 5, One Salt Sea
Book 6, Ashes of Honor
Book 7, Chimes at Midnight
Book 8, The Winter Long
Book 9, A Red-Rose Chain
Book 10, Once Broken Faith

Chapter One

October 9th, 2013

Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell .—William Shakespeare, Macbeth.

THE FETCH IS ONE of the most feared and least understood figures in Faerie. Their appearance heralds the approach of inescapable death: once the Fetch shows up, there’s nothing that can be done. The mechanism that summons them has never been found, and they’ve always been rare, with only five conclusively identified in the last century. They appear for the supposedly significant—kings and queens, heroes and villains—and they wear the faces of the people they have come to escort into whatever awaits the fae beyond the borders of death. They are temporary, transitory, and terrifying.

My Fetch, who voluntarily goes by “May Daye,” because nothing says “I am a serious and terrible death omen” like having a pun for a name, showed up more than three years ago. She was supposed to foretell my impending doom. Instead, all she managed to foretell was me getting a new roommate. Life can be funny that way.

At the moment, doom might have been a nice change. May was standing on the stage of The Mint, San Francisco’s finest karaoke bar, enthusiastically bellowing her way through an off- key rendition of Melissa Etheridge’s “Come to My Window.” Her live-in girlfriend, Jazz, was sitting at one of the tables closest to the stage, chin propped in her hands, gazing at May with love and adoration all out of proportion to the quality of my Fetch’s singing.

May has the face I wore when she appeared. We don’t look much alike anymore, but when she first showed up at my apartment door to tell me I was going to die, we were identical. She has my memories up to the point of her creation: years upon years of parental issues, crushing insecurity, abandonment, and criminal activities. And right now, none of that mattered half as much as the fact that she also had my absolute inability to carry a tune.

“Why are we having my bachelorette party at a karaoke bar again?” I asked, speaking around the mouth of the beer bottle I was trying to keep constantly against my lips. If I was drinking, I wasn’t singing. If I wasn’t singing, all these people might still be my friends in the morning.

Of course, with as much as most of them had already had to drink, they probably wouldn’t notice if I did sing. Or if I decided to sneak out of the bar, go home, change into my sweatpants, and watch old movies on the couch until I passed out. Which would have been my preference for how my bachelorette party was going to go, if I absolutely had to have one. I didn’t think they were required. May had disagreed with me. Vehemently. And okay, that had sort of been expected.

What I hadn’t expected was for most of my traitorous, backstabbing friends to take her side. Stacy—one of my closest friends since childhood—had actually laughed in my face when I demanded to know why she was doing this to me.

“Being your friend is like trying to get up close and personal with a natural disaster,” she’d said. “Sure, we have some good times, but we spend half of them covered in blood. We just want to spend an evening making you as uncomfortable as you keep making the rest of us.”

Not to be outdone, her eldest daughter, Cassandra, had blithely added, “Besides, we don’t think even you can turn a karaoke party into a bloodbath.”

All of my friends are evil.

As my Fetch and hence the closest thing I had to a sister, May had declared herself to be in charge of the whole affair. That was how we’d wound up reserving most of the tables at The Mint for an all-night celebration of the fact that I was getting married. Even though we didn’t have a date, a plan, or a seating chart, we were having a bachelorette party. Lucky, lucky me.

My name is October Daye. I am a changeling; I am a knight; I am a hero of the realm; and if I never have to hear Stacy sing Journey songs again, it will be too soon.