A Local Habitation

The thing that bothers me most about this book is the sheer idiocy of everyone, most especially Toby. The other thing I realized that bothered me most about book 1 and book 2 is the fact that I just don't have much respect for her.

She spends the entire book running around clueless, talking to people and doing nothing, while saying (over and over and OVER again), “I'm doing my best.” Really, Toby? REALLY?

Why the hell is everyone in her life falling all over themselves to fawn over her? I can't believe Sylvester or the Luidaeg or Tybalt could be THAT stupid. October Daye is an unpleasant, “I think I'm baddass (but actually I'm not)” asshole who does detestable things. Like kissing a married guy, for one. Being dumb, for another. Being absolutely obnoxious (for no reason) and running her mouth – and yes, yes, I know that it's a “feature” of urban fantasy to have a shit-talking “sassy” heroine who doesn't know when to STFU, but it gets extremely annoying. They're never as badass as they try to come off, and not funny either. I suppose I could kind of forgive this series seeing as it's older, but damn.

If it weren't for everyone saying that the series gets “so much better” (my skepticism rises), then I would be done with this one.

3.5 stars
Not as good as the first one but still fun.

Oh, this was really good! It took me a bit to get into it, but I think that was just me.
Excellent murder-mystery, I figured out part of the solution but not all of it and it was interesting right up to the end.

This was a perfectly acceptable second installment. McGuire really has me attached to her world building and characters but the plot here wasn't my favorite - this particular mystery wasn't actually entirely mysterious, so it felt a bit slow at points waiting for the characters to catch up and notice the things that were glaringly obvious to me as a reader. I'm pretty fond of these characters, though, Tybalt in particular. The things McGuire gets right are more than enough to keep me reading further into this series.

I ended up liking this more than the first one, but it felt displaced – somewhat outside of the storyline I remembered.
Will read the next one.

I will say, this book was a slight improvement in some way compared to the first book. In some other ways? Not really.

Toby's liege, Sylvester has a niece who has her own tiny little dominion independent from any other lands where she runs her fae tech company. For some reason she can't be reached for weeks, which makes his uncle worry, so Toby is sent there, where she finds mysterious murders, of course.

I will be honest, Toby is still a bloody idiot. She is the queen of angst, of “but my life is so bad, honestly, I am the unloved stepchild of this whole magical world” where she is basically chased around by people who inexplicably adore her and would do anything for her sorry ass to have it great. She is the type to fuck up her own life, though. To just always make the stupid decision and push people away for whatever teenage emo reason she can invent in that stupid head of hers.
Because man, Toby is duuuuumb. Now of course she is really out of touch with a lot of modern things, as she was a freaking fish in a pond for 14 years. That is cool. But. Imagine the boss of a company. Maybe you are an awesome person who actually has a company, god knows I am not. So this person owns a company. Is it suspicious to you if said person can operate the generators of the building? Because MY boss knows all the machines he has. Toby thinks that's suspicious, though. She also doesn't think phones not working at a tech company should be considered suspicious and a sign of someone messing with them.
The worst is, though... how she is not CHARMING dumb. Some characters just act kind of dumb and you still like them, because they are sweet in some way. (Yes, Harry Dresden. He is an adorable idiot who doesn't take himself too seriously and you feel for the guy.)
At one point there is a potential love interest for Toby in EVERY FUCKING ROOM. Like she is here with Tybalt, but then goes over to Connor, but then Alex pisses her off, so she runs back to Tybalt. Like honestly, she has no respect for others or for herself. Will the next book happen at Camp I-Love-Toby-Daye?

I liked the idea of a magical tech company, but it wasn't really used as much as it could have been.

I will be honest, I am quitting this series. It's cheesy, it's stupid, it's badly written. It has idiotic characters. I even looked at the Wikipedia to figure out if this hot mess of a Mary Sue harem fantasy of a trainwreck was ever going to get better. No. It seems like this will go on being about everyone loving Queen Emo McCheesestein's ass.
So bye, stupid series.

Sylvester has asked October to go to Tamed Lightning to check on his niece. He hasn't heard from her in awhile, and there are others that want her land. Fearing the worst, he sends October and Quentin to check things out. She can tell something isn't right as soon as they get there. I love these characters, especially Toby, Quentin, and even Tybalt is growing on me. This would've been 5 stars, but all the computer stuff made it too strange for me. Other than that, it was great.

Okay, second book in the series, and I still think October is kinda not great at her job. She still stumbled a crazy amount of times. This book had fewer people needing to save her bacon, so that's an improvement. A couple plot twists seemed pretty darned obvious to me, with one of them straight out of Buffy. :)

Spike: Ben, Glory. He's a doctor, she's the Beast. Two entirely separate entities sharing one body. It's like a bloody sitcom.

But just like the last time, I want to read on, and that means there's a lot of good here. And I love the image of all the cats gathering together at the end to see justice done.

I liked the world and the characters, but the “mystery” was really lacking for me here.
There were some characters I wished I could have seen more of, but what can you do. Here side kick (sorry don't remember how to spell his name) was an enjoyable character.
The major mysteries of the book were pretty annoying though. Maybe I just read too many mysteries, but I figured it out pretty quick. After that it was like when you watch a horror movie and you tell at the screen, “don't go on the house! How do you not know he is the murderer!”.

I found this book very frustrating. I felt that Toby was acting stupid from the moment she entered Taming Lightning, ignoring the obvious from the get go, causing me be to become more and more frustrated with the story line.

While I still like the general idea of the series this was a definite miss for me.

I read the first October Daye novel a while ago. And while I enjoyed it, there were elements of the style that were off putting. I am happy to say that Local Habitation has much fewer of those problems stylistically. The story was enjoyable and revealed much more about the world the novel inhabits.

My only criticism of the novel is that much of the character conflict within the novel revolves around October trying to investigate a strange situation. It feels as though very little progress is made through of her own accord.

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