Doug's Book Reviews: Rosemary and Rue

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	Rosemary and Rue		Rating
			C
	Seanan McGuire
	Series Info	Related Books
	#1 in series October Daye	No related books
October Daye — yes, that's her real name, thank you — is a changeling, half human and half fae. She used to be an investigator and troubleshooter for Duke Sylvester, until she got ambushed by a suspect. Suddenly she's lost fourteen years of the human life and family she was building, and her confidence. October's doing her best to stay away from pureblood affairs, now. But when one of her friends is murdered and curses her to solve the case or die trying, it doesn't exactly leave October much choice but to brush off old skills and get to work. The lone wolf investigator is such a staple of the detective genre that it's practically a given. But unlike most main characters, October doesn't actually enjoy being an outsider. Most — though not all — detective stories I've read star a sarcastic and witty investigator, whose attitude offsets his cynicism and loneliness. But October reads more like a dog who's been kicked once too often and has crawled off to whimper in the corner. Not literally — she is made of stronger stuff than that, at least — but for the first third or so of the book she's runs as hard as she can away from anything related to the fae. In addition, most of the tales of her life that surface over the course of the novel are of bad things happening to her. It all adds up to a subtle but omnipresent air of gentle hopelessness. Or, perhaps, a less subtle one of regret. Either way, it's not exactly the most uplifting of attitudes. That mostly disappears once October stops trying to hard to keep herself away from pureblood fae, thank goodness. But the second act consists largely of her getting beat up, shot, and otherwise physically abused. Even she comments at one point that falling unconscious in a haze of pain and blood was getting to be a habit. October's too busy fighting for her life to do any investigating. For that matter, even once she gets her feet under her and isn't dealing with attacks every waking moment she doesn't really do all that much detective work. She asks questions of a few people and quite accidentally asks just the right thing to just the right person and gets an answer much different from anything she might have expected. The story in Rosemary and Rue is good, but in many ways McGuire's writing is a bit... clumsy. She is a bit overfond, I think, of exposition, for instance. Everything needs a detailed explanation, and although each is usually short sometimes there's another paragraph of it on something or other every page or two, to the point where the plot stutters along like a manual car driven by someone who only knows automatics. And in the book's final pages October mused on all the little things that hadn't quite been resolved. I'm not at all against plot threads that stretch across multiple books — I quite enjoy them, in fact — but did McGuire really have to pointed list out each and ever one? It's like she felt it necessary to tell her readers, "Oh, and you might want to keep an eye on this and this and this. They'll be important later. Don't forget, now!" Like I said, it's clumsy. That's not to say the book mdash; or the author — is not good. I rather liked the setting, for one thing. Reasonably full and complete, and definitely McGuire's own creation; how magic works, how fae interact, and so much else is original to this setting, not copied from another. And it all works well together, too. October is an interesting character to follow, strong in all the right places but with plenty of room to grow and change as the series progresses. McGuire, like October, still has a bit of growing to do before she reaches her full potential. But the seeds of it have been sown, the roots in the ground. Rosemary and Rue* is a flawed book, to be sure, but at heart a decent and even good start to what promises to be an entertaining series. If you enjoy your mysteries with a healthy dose of magic in them, then you may want to check this one out.

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