Okay, I know we’ve been enjoying our “all temari, all the time” programming here, but I need to take a break for a while here to talk about books, because I’m working myself up to some carpal tunnel with all the stitching. (Not that this will prevent me from taking pictures and posting about stuff in the near future, of course.)
Last week, I was an inadvertent beneficiary of a major Amazon screw-up. They shipped the pre-orders of one of my favorite authors’ new book, Seanan McGuire’s Discount Armageddon, about 2 weeks early. (Full story here.) On the one hand, yay! A new book starting a new series that I had been anticipating greatly, and I get to read it now! But on the other hand, boo, they’ve now screwed up all her release week sales numbers, which are often the thing that determines whether a book hits the NYT Bestsellers list. All the stuff that shipped before the official release date won’t be counted. And that sucks.
So! If you haven’t already bought a copy, know that yesterday was the official release day! And though I debated waiting until the official release to read the book, I decided to go ahead and read it just so I could tell you all that it is, in fact, awesome. Well, awesome if what you are looking for is urban fantasy about a professional ballroom dancer and cryptozoologist, who also has to work as a cocktail waitress to pay the bills. It is hilarious and fun and action-packed and McGuire has put a HUGE amount of effort into creating extremely detailed and, dare I say, realistic descriptions of all sorts of mythological creatures, now just trying to live amongst humans peacefully.
This series is clearly going to be very different from McGuire’s October Daye novels. The Toby books are grounded in a more traditional “What if elves still lived among us?” type of urban fantasy, and Toby herself is a much darker character. (No ballroom dancing costumes, for example.) Toby is very much the central character of those books, and I cannot wait to learn more about her with each book. The InCryptid series, by contrast, seems lighter and fluffier on the surface, but has some interesting scientific stuff going on underneath the surface. It is also the story of an entire family, going back multiple generations. The Prices used to be a family of monster hunters, working industriously for the Covenant of St. George, but when one of them realized that killing all the cryptids (ie, mythological creatures) was having an actual effect on the ecosystem, he left. (Specifically, no more unicorns = rampant cholera outbreak due to uncleansed water.) The entire family has been considered traitors to the Covenant ever since, and have had to go into hiding to try to pursue their new vocation of studying and protecting cryptids.
One of the cryptids they discovered are the Aeslin mice. You can read their entry in the InCryptid Field Guide here. Here’s the bit that’s most important to the story so far:
The Aeslin mouse has a highly sophisticated society, centered around a devout religious class. Each colony of Aeslin mice to have been recorded has worshiped a different god or set of gods. These have included, but were not limited to, a large oak tree, a roll-top desk, and Caroline Davies’s chickens. The colony currently living in the Price family attic worships the family. It is generally believed that these religious leanings are intended to keep the colony unified, and to prevent straying from places of safety.
The heroine of this first book of the series, Verity, has a colony of Aeslin mice living with her in her semilegal sublet in Manhattan. They offer simultaneous comic relief and detail about the family’s past, in the form of their constant religious festivals and observances. One has to suspect that members of the Price family never have much of a crisis of faith in themselves, with all these tiny adorators following them around, constantly shouting “Hail!” and waving tiny pennants. Verity seems to find them largely annoying, for good reason, but it seems clear from most of the reviews of the book so far that the Aeslin mice are well on their way to being fan favorites. Read the book; you’ll want some, too.
Overall, I give this book a solid “Wheeeeeee!” Looking forward to the next one.
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