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

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

Fun urban fantasy originally read in paperback.

Each book in the October Daye series seems to get better and better. "The Winter Long" is a good example of this trend. This is a solid and entertaining tale. We follow Toby as she deals with emergencies of all kinds as she tries to protect herself, her friends, and allies from new threats. We learn a bit more about Toby's abilities and we learn more about the history of both Toby and the Faerie world. There is not a dull moment in this novel. It was fantastic.

A massive turning point in the October Daye. Nearly two years after I read this for the first time, I'm still so pleased with the title sychronicity with Rosemary and Rue (what's The Winter's Tale famous for).

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.

The title hints at the arrival of a character; Snow White as we'd know her, a woman with the looks and some characteristics of the fable girl but of course the Fae are seldom very nice people. In the first book Toby had just returned from being transmogrified into a fish and last book someone hinted that this might have been done (by a wizard who fled) to save her from a worse fate. Well that wizard Simon Torquil returns.

Not content with lying to Toby about Simon's relationship to her, her best friends and mentors have also hidden other personal knowledge from her, with excuses like, "It never came up in conversation." Really? Fae hundreds of years old with no entertainment other than gossip never brought up scandals and connections? I thought too many series characters are introduced with a "Nobody mentioned this person?" just like Toby is engaged to find too many missing children, heirs and otherwise. Otherwise this is a good fantasy adventure.

The worldbuilding is strong and detailed, if somewhat incestuous. Too much blood. Again.
I read an ARC from the Hugo Awards pack on Net Galley. This is an unbiased review.

Yet more revelations and yet more chaos follows Toby in this eighth instalment of this series. Out of all of the novels, this is perhaps my least favourite so far due largely in part to the slow pacing throughout. I often felt as though it was going nowhere and yet, I trusted in McGuire to take us somewhere good and she doesn't disappoint.

The mystery aspect takes a long time to get going and although the threat level is present from early on, it doesn't seem to go anywhere. By the time the actual focal point of the mystery becomes clear, I had been dipping in and out of it for days rather than being enthralled. The problem is that it does take a mighty long time to get there. It finishes strongly, and the background of firstborn and other characters is interesting... but there just wasn't enough plot to keep it moving at a reasonable pace throughout.

One of the greatest aspects of this novel is the characters and we get our much loved group of misfits, along with some blasts from the past. Everything you think you know is about to be turned upside down, including death itself. Simon Torquill steps back into the scene for reasons unknown to Toby, but considering his previous interactions with Toby left her as a fish for fourteen years, they aren't exactly on the best of terms.

The world building is also growing and expanding into an ever more complex and intricate tapestry that is fascinating to watch develop. Whilst I certainly enjoyed this hoever, it didn't quite have the verve or the spark that I have come to expect from these novels.

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.

This isn't among my favorite of the Toby Daye books. The central conflict doesn't interest me as much as some of the other ones. It is interesting to get more of the lore on the firstborn, but otherwise, I found it good, but not great.

I think I'm going to have to read it again before I review it. All I will say is this book is best if you reread right before this one.

This book is the payoff for reading the previous seven books. Not that the those were not enjoyable but they were but this one brings a major arc to a close and answers lots of questions but throws down questions that have been brought up and ignored by everyone previously have been shoved under Toby's nose so she can no longer be ignorant of who she is and her past. This is not a book for anyone to start the series but this is a payoff for every fan that has wondered about things that have happened in the previous books. And the story also reminded Toby that she has been mostly assuming things and people have assumed that she has known things when in actuality she hasn't. Not to give anything away but a small conversation with Etienne really brings into Toby's face what she doesn't know about herself does effect how people interact with her in the Fae community. Now I need to sit down and read the books again. I said at one point I was going to write down all the prophecy that has been said around her to see what has come true and what hasn't because there must be some clues about what will happen next.

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.]