In an Absent Dream

I'm very sad to say this has been my least favorite installment in this series. Starting with the good, though; Seanan McGuire's writing is stunning and gorgeous as ever and I don't think she will ever disappoint on that front. I also fell in love with Lundy, as I always do with our main characters. She was interesting, flawed, and fleshed out, and I will never understand how Seanan McGuire can do that with so few pages. However, this book was very strange because it took place over the longest span of time than any of the other books. There were several exciting things that happened and characters that were just talked about but we never got to see. Why tell me about the cool stuff and then not show me it? I had to hear them talk about a dead girl and a tarantula queen or something but not even that story was ever laid out for us. Instead, we saw a few mundane things happening in each world and then got told that interesting things happened at some other time. The world itself was the least compelling of any we've visited before, as was the moral/theme of the book. As usual, there was one overarching message, almost like a fable. But this books' was mostly about money and payment and I just didn't care. The side characters were lacking as well, which is not typical of this series. I didn't have any sort of connection or understanding of Moon and why she did the things she did. I liked Lundy's little sister more than Moon and I only knew her little sister for about 20 pages! In the end, I defintely didn;t hate this book; in fact, I had a great time reading it and I'm still excited for the next installment. It was just not up to par with what I've come to expect from this series.