| Title: | One Salt Sea | |
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| Author: | Seanan McGuire | |
| Publication Date: | September 2011 | |
| Publisher's Description | October "Toby" Daye is settling into her new role as Countess of Goldengreen. She's actually dating again, and she's taken on Quentin as her squire. So, of course, it's time for things to take a turn for the worse. Someone has kidnapped the sons of the regent of the Undersea Duchy of Saltmist. To prevent a war between land and sea, Toby must find the missing boys and prove the Queen of the Mists was not behind their abduction. Toby's search will take her from the streets of San Francisco to the lands beneath the waves, and her deadline is firm: she must find the boys in three days' time, or all of the Mists will pay the price. But someone is determined to stop her-and whoever it is isn't playing by Oberon's Laws... |
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| My rating: | ****.5 | |
I liked the first book in this series well enough to read the second, but An Artificial Night just didn’t interest me as a story, and I nearly gave up on the series altogether. Thankfully, I liked Toby and her mad, mad world enough to give it another try. I’m truly glad that I stuck it out for the next three titles in this series. Each of them has been better than the last, and One Salt Sea is so full of win and awesomeness that I fear the bar may now be set too high for book 6.
Toby is a really compelling character; she’s not human, and doesn’t experience the type of angst over her non-human status that is at this point almost a staple (cliche?) of non/quasi-human protagonists in urban fantasy. Toby’s hangups are largely related to class; as a changeling, she has always had a lower status in the world she chose. With her unasked for ascension to the nobility, she is now the technical equal of many of those who would shun her, which is uncomfortable for everybody involved. Toby’s life up to this point has been about learning to exist on the fringes of both fae and human society, and becoming the Countess of Goldengreen does not mesh well with the survival skills and coping mechanisms that Toby had to acquire to make it to her midfifties. She has rules that are all her own, and make her who she is. These rules are different the rules embodied by some of her closest friends and associates, and leads to a fair amount of tension over some of her actions. It is a testament to how many disparate plots are presented and resolved in this novel that this conflict is not even the first or second most pressing thing going on in Toby’s world.
I can’t begin to offer a reasonable synopsis of this novel that is not spoilerific, but I will say that I definitely didn’t expect to find myself sniffling away at my desk as I finished this book during my lunch break. Seanan McGuire did not pull any punches with this novel.