Ashes of Honor (October Daye, #6)

Ashes of Honor (October Daye, #6) - Seanan McGuire October Daye is managing to move on with her life after the loss of both Connor and her daughter – but it’s hard and her grief is a background for this book. But, perhaps more so for that grief, she cannot turn away Etienne when he comes to her for help. He has a daughter, a changeling daughter who he never knew about. Her mother has only just informed him of her because she has gone missing – not just gone missing, but literally vanished before her friend’s eyes.Perhaps not impossible, given that Etienne’s a Tuatha de Danaan, a skilled teleporter, but there’s definitely something suspicious with this disappearance. And to make it worse, Chelsea is one of those Changelings without limits – or controls – on her power. She can break barriers that were never meant to be broken, open portals to places that were best kept sealed and the consequence of doing so may be to bring down those barriers entirely, devastating faerie.Getting involved quickly drops her into a whole heap of fae politics – only further complicated with chaos in Tybalt’s court of catsThis is another excellently written adventure with the multiple threads of the story coming together and conflicting with each other. They have a desperate mission, the world itself could rest in the balance and at the same time –with the worst possible timing – Tybalt is faced with his own revolution from the court of cats. I like how the four story threads we have here: finding Chelsea , stopping Chelsea destroying the world, finding Raj and dealing with the court of cast are all interlinked, even extremely closely related storylines but they also serve as competition for time. It adds to the tension to have it all going on at once but also adds to the realism to have them inter-related.The story is well paced, well balanced and nicely mixes character emotion and bonds with action to keep it moving at a decent pace. It’s nice to see the world develop and have some names put on long mentioned faces while at the same time visiting some of the older characters in the series; including Tamed Lightning. This gives a sense that it’s not just Toby. I also like that, while Toby is a special one-and-only-kind-of-fae (except her absent mother), she isn’t a special one-and-only-kind-of-fae with the Awesome Super Power of Awesomeness as is so often the case. Her strength, her power, her agency, her excellence as a character is not based on the special shiny powers she has or her amazing ability to kill things – because she doesn’t have them. She does have super miraculous healing which means she doesn’t spend nearly as much time healing as she did – but it does mean she can keep on being a punch bag which is one thing this series occasionally makes me uncomfortable about (though the first book was by far the worst on that and it has got exponentially better.And the Luidaeg is still awesome. It is known.Read More