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

This is a novel in the October Daye series. (book 9) It has a strong female protagonist. The story is an urban fantasy in the San Francisco area. It is mostly a thriller, with some romance, and faery characters. Reading age range from 14 years old. (Young adult) There is a quote from Shakespeare in the beginning. The book features a list and description of faery creatures from English and Celtic lore.
Trigger warning : bloodshed.

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

Fun urban fantasy originally read in paperback.

"A Red-Rose Chain" is the ninth novel by Seanan McGuire in the Hugo nominated "October Daye" series.
As usual this book is filled with magic, blood, adventure, romance, roses, humor, and less coffee than the earlier books in the series. Toby finds herself being assigned as a diplomat in a nearly impossible situation to prevent an all out war between kingdoms. Fortunately she received good advice and has the companionship of her allies. As other books in the series, Toby and her friends are faced with ongoing danger as they cope with the situation. And as with the other books in the series, this one was really really hard to put down. I can't wait to get started reading the next in the series. Thank you Seanan!

In which Toby is forced to do international diplomacy, and somehow manages to be successful in that and in changing how the kingdoms relate to each other forever (actually that was Walther, but we'll give our girl partial credit).

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.

This is carefully plotted and described, but many readers will agree that the first half lacks movement. Toby the changeling is sent as a sort of diplomat to another Fae Court - I can't think why one of the haughty courtiers wasn't sent as there seems to be an abundance of them, and Toby is a mere changeling. Toby of course starts looking at issues like how different peoples are treated and the allegories are excellent.

After some time, a murder is committed, and Toby takes over investigating with, once more, no halfway competent captain of the guard telling her to get out while they do the investigating. The use of elf-shot an immobilising weapon is getting too repetitive and tedious - the author needs to come up with new weapons. The cast of characters does grow, because of all the diplomacy, and Toby is on unfamiliar ground, but she still manages to get beaten up and covered in blood. Again. Might be a mistake reading all these books back to back. Some of the scenes get to feel like copy and paste. Once the action has started the story pace improves.

I read an ARC from the Hugo Awards pack on Net Galley. This is an unbiased review.

McGuire just keeps on surpassing my expectations with this series and I can't get enough of them. Unfortunately I've had to hold off for now to try and catch up on the rest of my Hugo reading but I will be back!

Toby being sent as a diplomat is a hilarious concept and I can see why McGuire decided to play with it. It would be like making me a diplomat... bull in a china shop doesn't even begin to cover it. But when war is at stake, she doesn't have much of a choice... and we all know this is going to end badly. After all, Toby usually ends up covered in blood... lots of it her own.

The characters here are once more beautifully presented - both new and old - and the interplay between them is wonderful. The diverse range of individuals and personalities mean that you will never be bored, and McGuire constantly pulls new surprises out of the hat. The development of long standing characters is noted, particularly Toby who is growing into the realisation that she has a support network and May, carving her own life path out.

All in all, another excellent installment.

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.

I love this book! It heavily features one of my favorite secondary characters in this universe (seriously, my heart will always belong in part to Walther). The plot is fast-paced and compelling, and we get some good character development for most of the main crew. I did find the villains a little mustache-twirly, but that kind of feels like a defining characteristic of Toby Daye books at this point.

The ninth book in the series has Toby leaving the kingdom as an ambassador to the Silences to prevent a war. The false queen is there using the king she set up on the throne in order to try and take back the Mists. Of course things are not as they seem in the Mists and Toby is on the hunt for any ally she can get her hands on to stop the war and maybe put the old royal family back on the throne.
What I liked about this was stuff you found out about certain people from previous books and what Toby thinks she can do with her magic. I’m hoping for at least a short story to cover the promise she made at the end of the book.

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.]