All of Seanan's books are fun, and I and my staff at The Portal Bookshop regularly get someone new hooked on the series

A Tam Lin retelling which always appeals to me. Adventure, mystery and creepiness abound., and hope for romance.

Received as part of the 2019 Hugo packet for Best Series.

Fun urban fantasy originally read in paperback.

I enjoyed this story, but it had a few things that kept taking me out of the narrative. One (that could just be a me thing) was that the tone kept swinging wildly, so that even though the danger/horror of the main plot continues through the end, the narrator would stop an action sequence to talk about how aroused she was by another character (I kept thinking the book was ending, because the tone of a temporary reprieve was the same as the tone of the actual end). At several other times, the writing was confusing in a way that felt accidental rather than intentional.

In the third book of the October Daye series, Seanan McGuire's "An Artificial Night" took an emotional turn for me. Of course, McGuire's characters and protagonists are always interesting, but in this novel, the care shown to her by her friends brought tears to my eyes several times. This novel was less about the protagonist's investigative skills and more about negotiating the oh-so-dangerous faerie world, regulations, and restrictions. In the end, she became closer to her friends and made new friends in the process. This was a wonderful, dark, and adventurous book. It was an excellent addition to the October Daye series.

Thank you so much for making this book available for Hugo voters. I will always vote for Seanan as she’s my favourite author.

I am planning a Seanan book binge in the new year. After I have read this book I will submit my review to NetGalley, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Angus & Robertson, and Booktopia.

Great work in this series, giving us a female hero with not a lot of helpers, but a good few hangers-on, some of whom are helpful and some of whom she needs to protect. In this instalment Toby has a children's birthday party to attend, with a few differences since the kids are magical. Then she's called upon when the kids are abducted, magically of course. They have been taken by a nightmarish creature to a haunted land, and Toby's heroic quest begins in San Francisco with the arrival of her own Fetch, a foreshadowing of her death.

Not top marks because we do get a good deal of repetition, including three separate journeys to the haunted land, and repetition of information, and Toby repeating what everyone says to her. I am surprised an editor didn't strike out several lines. Many of the city locations also repeat Toby's familiar settings from the earlier books. And as I've commented on earlier books, when we are regularly told that Fae don't regard mortals as valuable and could kill them at a glance, it's odd that they don't do any such thing. Still, we see a variety of Fae and their ilk, plenty of setting variation and some spooky scenes. I especially like the way that all Toby's senses are used to describe events. Not for the nervous.

I downloaded a Hugo Awards pack from Net Galley. This is an unbiased review.

I originally read this book in early 2013 when a friend recommended Seanan McGuire to me. I very binged on the first seven books in the series and then anxiously awaited The Winter Long.

An Artificial Night had its hooks in me from the beginning. Rosemary and Rue and A Local Habitation are where we are introduced to the weirdness of faerie and what Toby's life is. This book takes us deep, beyond human nightmares, and into fae nightmares. We start to see glimpses of the deeper workings and secrets of faerie that have been hidden since the realms were sealed by Oberon. We start to see the shapes moving under the blanket of the Summerlands, telling us that there is so, so much more than what we see on the surface.

This book is where we see that so much of faerie is nightmare, and we start to get hints that Toby's road is going to long, hard, and filled with blood and death. But also amazing friendships and found family.

The way that Seanan mixes darkness and light throughout this series and its short stories is something truly unique and every time I finish the new book in this series, I am ready to read the next one right away. Sadly, waiting must be done. Thankfully, Seanan doesn't actually sleep and writes like a madwoman.

This is a big book for Toby. She meets her Fetch, faces the most frightening villain (arguably to date, but spoilers!), and she realizes that maybe she doesn't have to do anything alone. If you're not in the tank for Toby by this book, I don't think you will ever be (sad!)

Toby Daye is at it again, only this time her assignment is going to take her deeper into the darkest realms of the fae world and nobody truly expects her to come out of it alive this time. That includes Toby herself. But when children are going missing from across the land, it is not her own liege lord to call in her obligations, but the King of the Cats. And the fae take their obligations seriously.

This is perhaps my favourite instalment in this series so far, it's dark and the humour is dulled down as well although it still lingers in the darkness. McGuire has truly got her characters to shine here and I am coming to love the entire cast in honesty. Additional surprises and mysteries about people we thought we knew are coming out of the woodwork, leading to a convoluted yet intriguing tangle of lies, truths and half truths. This allows for further world building to draw you into this world.

I'm never quite sure what I'm going to find coming into when I start one of these books. It is rarely what I expect and I am even more rarely disappointed. I certainly wasn't here.

October Daye series given by the author (/publishers/organizers) with the voters' packet for Hugo Nomination of Best Series in 2019. Reviews will be coming later, and likely posted first to GoodReads/Amazon/B & N as books are already released.

As this was part of the Hugo voting packet, I will not have time to read this and review before the archive date. I will try to update this review when I have read this book.

I downloaded this as part of my Hugo Voter packet. Fantastic! My top nominee for Best Series. Seanan McGuire is a treasure.

The third book in the series brings another character named after a month, granted her name is a bit of a pun. Toby takes on the impossible task of rescuing children that have been taken by the wild hunt. I really don't want to say more than that since The story is so great. The only thing I will add is you find out more about other characters in this universe and it isn't all nice. I did like how the cover is a slice out of the story instead of just being a pose of the main character as so many urban fantasies seem to be lately.

On my re-read I remain convinced that this should have been the 2nd book instead. I feel the sense of massive danger in the first book flows nicely into this one and it makes more sense in my opinion.

So I like this much better than the 1st & 2nd books and Toby continues to be awesome. Plus we get May, Tybalt goodness, and Toby finally admitting she's a hero. Good times!

This is among my least favorite of the Toby Daye books. I'm always happy to delve deeper into the details and machinations of Toby's world, but the story in this book just didn't land well to me.

October Daye used to be a private eye who worked for the fae in San Francisco, because being a changeling made that a natural choice – right until she got forced to spend nineteen years as a fish after an investigation went wrong. Once the curse was broken, she tried to go back to a normal life, only to get dragged back into murders and mysteries. Rosemary and Rue is a murder mystery with curses; A Local Habitation is supposed to be Toby as a political envoy, and then; and An Artificial Night is a missing persons case with shades of Tam Lin.

I think my problem with this series is that I was sold on it as a mystery series with fae, and it's really really not. It's an extended character study with a vague mystery to hang the character stuff on, which is fine when that's what I'm expecting (see also: Sunshine is great, fight me), but when I'm expecting a mystery it makes me really salty. Especially because the foreshadowing is a bit too obvious for me and tends to reveal the plot about a third of the book before Toby realises what the plot is – it's been suggested that this might be because I have a lot of genre savvy for mysteries, and that other people didn't have this problem so absolutely judge that for yourselves! It makes Toby look absolutely oblivious though, which is frustrating for me as a reader.

As a character study though, they're not bad! Toby is a mess who flings herself into all of her problems like they're the last thing she's ever going to do (I think because in most of these they literally are), and her problem solving skills are inventive. I love her friendship group as well, though she doesn't treat them well – which I thought she'd learned by the end of the first book but more fool me – but I enjoy reading about them and how much she is loved, and how she absolutely cannot process it. The voice the story is written in is really great, especially for how Toby explains the weird politics and magic of the fae. I love how her magic works, because the reliance on nursery rhymes to help her shape it really makes me happy. And the scenes that are meant to be horrifying are really well written – there is a scene with the night haunts in A Local Habitation that is delightfully creepy! I just... Hit a point in book four where I couldn't deal with how unrelentingly terrible everything is for Toby and the people around her anymore?

I feel like I should love these a lot more than I do, especially because I think everyone in my online social group adores them. It might just be a combination of trying to read a lot of them in quick succession before the Hugos, which meant that I burnt out on them, and that my expectations of what they were were mismanaged. If I'd come to it as an urban fantasy series where sometimes there are mysteries and sometimes there is going to other planes to fight a creature from nightmares, maybe I would have been okay and I would love it as much as everyone else does! Especially because, as it's been pointed out, I really like Human Disaster heroes, so this might be internalised misogyny showing up to steal my wallet. As it is, I am taking a break from the series until I feel brave enough to try again.

[This review is based off the omnibus provided by the publisher in the Hugo packet.]