| Date: 14 April 2011, 12:44
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I was really looking forward to A Local Habitation. Rosemary and Rue impressed me - it was smart, with a really vivid setting and amazing worldbuilding, and an appealing underdog heroine. I had some problems with the plotting, but it had so many of the qualities necessary to a good series that I was excited about continuing on with the story.
Having read A Local Habitation, I'm not exactly disappointed. I read it in one sitting, but this time I didn't close the book eager to find out what happens next. I still admired the really excellent setting and atmosphere. But the new book provided new, different plotting problems. I thought that the author telegraphed the villain too soon, and too obviously. That's overstating things a bit, but without giving spoilers, all I can say is I had a rough idea of how things were going to play out by page...I don't know, 50 or 60? Way, way too early.
And then I started getting irritated that Toby wasn't seeing the obvious. It's frustrating to read a book where you can put together all the clues, and you know that your protagonist has access to all the same information that you do, but doesn't make the same connections. It's even more frustrating when people are dying all over the place. Toby starts off the book feeling all this guilt because she couldn't keep Dare alive, and then she walks into her next assignment and repeats the same mistakes she made before.
There's one really key moment in A Local Habitation where Toby decides she needs to perform a very dangerous ritual. It's a really cool scene in the book. It's tense, fascinating, gives us insight into the world of fairy and Toby's character, shows us how brave she is and how totally willing she is to put everything on the line for the safety of others. The problem? It's ultimately a distraction. If Toby had opted not to perform this dangerous and fascinating ritual, she'd probably have solved her case a lot faster, and prevented someone from dying.
And I think that McGuire has a similar issue with the Tybalt plotline. Tybalt is an obvious love interest. McGuire writes their interactions as though they still have some sort of love/hate relationship, but they don't act that way at all. When Tybalt leaves his jacket at Toby's house at the beginning of the novel, she picks it up and wears it for pretty much the rest of the book, and takes comfort from the smell. When Toby is in trouble, Tybalt drops everything to come to the rescue. Tybalt is blatantly jealous - which Toby somehow doesn't pick up on at all - and Toby finds him attractive. So why does she consider pretty much every single other adult male in the whole novel as a potential love interest, but not Tybalt?
I love a good, slow, prickly advance-and-retreat between a heroine and her love interest. I'll follow along for book after book, watching the couple slowly, slowly, slowly get closer. But that's not what's going on here. Toby and Tybalt have advanced, neither is retreating, and the author is artificially keeping them apart to draw out their plotline. Apparently she thinks that readers can't tell the difference, but I can and I find it maddening.
So basically, the second book in the series had all the same strengths and weaknesses as the first one did. When McGuire does something well, she does it really well. But I'm starting to think that it's just not enough, at least for me. I love Toby, she has a great voice, I love McGuire's fairy-riddled San Francisco, I love the characters, so many of the twists and turns are really COOL, but I always feel like I'm being pulled along the author's guided track. The staging is perfect, but she loses me on the execution.
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