Rosemary and Rue

I enjoyed Feed so much, that I decided to pick up another of Seanan McGuire's books: Rosemary and Rue. This book is the first installment in a series of urban fantasy mystery novels. The protagonist, October Daye, is half-human, half-faerie, and serves as a P.I. in San Francisco, taking on cases from both worlds.

The title is a reference to Ophelia's final monologue in Hamlet, one of the Shakespeare plays I'm actually familiar with. I even played Ophelia when I was in middle school. According to the play, rosemary is for remembrance and rue is for repentance. October struggles with both of these over the course of the book.

There's a brief prologue that takes place roughly 14 years before the story starts. While on a case, October is magically imprisoned. By the time she's freed, her fiance and daughter have given her up for dead and the rest of her life is in similar shambles. Not knowing what to do, but knowing that she doesn't want to repeat past mistakes, October does her best to avoid her old life.

But the story wouldn't be nearly as interesting if she were allowed to simply fade out of faerie. So October is quickly brought back into the fold when one of the faerie nobles is murdered. Throughout the mystery, October is constantly being confronted by a life and people she abandoned and is sifting through her regret and mistakes.

Like Feed, the world in this book is richly detailed and a lot of fun. Faerie society is complex and interesting, with warring factions and centuries of history. And there's just enough magic to keep things fun without making it too easy to solve everything.

There are several more books in this series, which is still being written, and I'm really looking forward to getting around to them. As I near the end of Discworld, it's nice to have found another, fairly light, fantasy series to keep me occupied.

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