Sleep No More (October Daye #17)

Sleep No More by Seanan McGuire

After the ending of book 16, October Daye fans were on tenterhooks for Sleep No More. It's been a long road with a LOT of world building and connecting threads for McGuire to get us here. And I think it's pretty amazing how she can continue to throw us something we didn't see coming.

Without getting into spoiler-y specifics, one thing that I was particularly intrigued by are the relationships forged between several different characters who had never really had a chance to get to know each other previously. They open up lots of new layers and possibilities for future books. McGuire's characters have always felt very real, they have real tensions and real difficulties and real ways of working through them even though they're usually in the midst of a stressful and chaotic plot. I've always loved her ability to balance the heroic adventures with the mundane, and this particular book forges some alliances out of necessity that are quite unexpected, but in a good way.

In the forward, McGuire states that she wrote this book when our world was changing because of the global pandemic, and humanity had to adapt to a reality we didn't always recognize. Reflecting on this book with that fact in mind really puts some things into context. I have always loved how fiction is a place we can process big things, both as readers and writers, and I think McGuire does an amazing job with that in Sleep No More.

That said, if you want to read this purely for the fantasy and escape the real world for a bit - it's still a great read for that too! Compelling, fast-paced, at times heart-wrenching and at times hopeful, this is essentially a book about what family is and holding fast to it when you've found it.

The novella that follows the book takes place at the same time but from Rayseline's point of view. She's a character who I've been very sympathetic to after the events of the last book or so, and I really liked getting to see how she was thinking and problem solving, and earnestly trying to live in the circumstances she lands in.