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Book Review of Rosemary and Rue (October Daye, Bk 1)

Rosemary and Rue (October Daye, Bk 1)
jai avatar reviewed on + 310 more book reviews


It didn't take me very long to fall in love with the world building in this book. I could see San Francisco and I could see the hidden parts and faerie creatures that were everywhere for Toby, but hidden from human eyes. Some parts are beautiful, some are scary and gritty, and there are so many varieties of creatures from Pixies and Undine to Cait Sidhe to Kitsune. And then we have the halfbreeds and the changelings, like Toby, who are considered lower caste for their human blood, diluted magic, and shorter lives. In Toby's opinion, changelings have the short end of the stick, because no one knows what to do with them really, they don't belong in the human world, but they aren't treated well by the faerie.

There are quite a few characters we're introduced to throughout the book. Toby has a lot of friends, many with back stories hinted at throughout the book. I liked a lot of them and wanted to read more. Hopefully many of them will be reoccurring characters in this series. There's also suggestions of possible romantic interest in Toby, but only very brief ones, this is still an urban fantasy. Two of these guys I firmly believed to be *wrong* for her and I was rooting against them. I already had my favorite ship, which I share with Ana of the Book Smugglers - Tybalt, the king of the Cait Sidhe.

The prologue gives you a pretty good indication of the author's storytelling - things get messy for our heroine. This book has some gritty aspects along with the prettiness: deaths, kids being exploited, unhappy people. Toby makes mistakes and the bad guys are willing to do anything to get what they want. This means Toby gets very beaten up in this book while trying to figure out who killed her friend. I liked that Toby finds out some harsh truths about herself, but the constant rebounding Toby has to do to get there was exhausting. But overall: I'd say it made me excited to read this.