With Fate Conspire
It's always a little weird to know how a story ends before you even
read it. I came into this series halfway through and looped back around
to the beginning after I finished everything else that had been written.
Thanks to those later books I knew before I began that Lady Lune and
Michael Deven would fall in love and that Lune would be the Queen of
Onyx Court by the end of the book. But knowing the ending did nothing to
spoil the fun of getting there.
Midnight Never Come isn't quite as good as the books that came later. But that's mostly because Brennan grew as an author. And that's not to say that this book was in any way bad. It was just lacking a little something that's present in A Star Shall Fall and With Fate Conspire. For one, it limits itself to two point of view characters, while the later books allow glimpses of many more motives. It was also far more straightforward, and I preferred the slightly meandering quality of the other books. There are also some ideas that are far more fleshed out later in the series, and I felt like my understanding benefited greatly from learning about those first.
But these are minor nitpicks. It was a lot of fun to go back and see how the story began. To watch Lune rise to power and fall in love. To finally get a story from her perspective instead of always experiencing her as a larger-than-life queen inhabiting the edges of the tale.
It was also fun to see some patterns take shape. The class progression of this series is actually quite interesting. This first book concerns itself with the Faerie Queen, Queen Elizabeth, and their inner circles. In the third book, most of the characters could probably be considered middle class, and the final book tells the story of immigrants and low-class criminals. The perspective of London changes drastically over the course of the series, and I'm excited to see where the second book fits into this (it could, of course, completely disrupt the pattern).
Midnight Never Come isn't quite as good as the books that came later. But that's mostly because Brennan grew as an author. And that's not to say that this book was in any way bad. It was just lacking a little something that's present in A Star Shall Fall and With Fate Conspire. For one, it limits itself to two point of view characters, while the later books allow glimpses of many more motives. It was also far more straightforward, and I preferred the slightly meandering quality of the other books. There are also some ideas that are far more fleshed out later in the series, and I felt like my understanding benefited greatly from learning about those first.
But these are minor nitpicks. It was a lot of fun to go back and see how the story began. To watch Lune rise to power and fall in love. To finally get a story from her perspective instead of always experiencing her as a larger-than-life queen inhabiting the edges of the tale.
It was also fun to see some patterns take shape. The class progression of this series is actually quite interesting. This first book concerns itself with the Faerie Queen, Queen Elizabeth, and their inner circles. In the third book, most of the characters could probably be considered middle class, and the final book tells the story of immigrants and low-class criminals. The perspective of London changes drastically over the course of the series, and I'm excited to see where the second book fits into this (it could, of course, completely disrupt the pattern).
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