Search - Blood and Iron (Promethean Age, Bk 1)

I have to admit that the first time I read this book, I liked the characters and the ambiance, but I ended up so confused by all of the players that I couldn't follow the plot very well at all. Halfway through, I looked up all of the characters of the King Arther mythologies on Wikipedia and made myself a cheat-sheet, because the author clearly expects you to already know who everyone is related to and why they hate each other. The second time I read it, after I had figured this all out, I absolutely adored it.

The characters are vibrant, sexy, and interesting, and the book fairly glows with color. The imagery is intense and the plot equally so.

One pet peeve: ***contains spoilers!!!*** Only someone who has never lived in New York would think of Times Square as the crossroads of the world. For the natives, it's just an ugly tourist trap in the middle of the monotonous business district.

This was my first book by Elizabeth Bear. It is intended to be the first book in (I quote from Bear's website) "a sprawling same-world fantasy cycle beginning in Summer 2006 with Blood & Iron, followed in 2007 by Whiskey & Water. These books deal with the five-century-old silent war between Faerie and the iron world, and the lives altered and destroyed on either side."
I really wanted to like this book a lot, but I found it hard to get into. It was very similar, I thought, to many other books that deal with the interaction of Faerie with modern-day American life. I was reminded at many points, strongly, of Charles DeLint, and at a few points of Laurell Hamilton (no explicit sex, though, just soap-opera-esque choosing between lovers).
Basically, our protagonist, Elaine, is the Seeker of the Seelie court. It's her job to track down part-Fae in the human world, and to bring them back to Annwyn. She's got a complicated thing going on with her ex- (and father of her child), who happens to be a werewolf. She's also got a Sidhe water-horse called Whiskey bound to her, who keeps trying to seduce her. Meanwhile, a coven of human mages is trying to cut the human world off from Faerie permantly, possibly destroying it completely in the process. But there're also alliances and conflicts to consider with Hell, Heaven, the Unseelie Court, the Merlin (not who you'd expect), Arthur (who you'd expect), the Dragon of Britain, Medb (the Faerie Queen), the werewolf pack, Morgan le Fay, talking trees (a sly homage to Tolkien in there), and lots more.
Possibly too much more. I felt that the book lost focus, because it started out seeming like it was going to mostly be about the Merlin and her loyalites/decisions, but she wound up being only a small part of what eventually happened. There were too many complex characters and relationships jammed in, without time to really get to know many of the characters - althought I have to say that I did really like both Whiskey and the Merlin.
I also really liked Bear's take on the veracity of mythology... "yes, it was true, now."

maybe if i had brushed up on my authurian literature before hand... but, as i read, most of the more commonly known things came back to me, and anything else i wouldn't have known made sense after awhile.

this was hard to read, even though i couldn't not finish it. i had a few problems with the why of things throughout, but it mostly ended up making sense to me in the end. not as fun a read as i had hoped.