One Salt Sea – Seanan McGuire

5 stars

Over in the Seanan McGuire/Mira Grant Fans group on Facebook, we’re doing a Re/Read Along as we prepare for book #12 in the series, Night and Silence, to be released in September. It’s newbie friendly, as we’re keeping our discussion limited to just the books we’ve read so far in the Re/Read along. We recently discussed Book #5, One Salt Sea, which happens to be one of my favorite Toby books.

October “Toby” Daye is finally doing all right—and that inevitably means it’s time for things to take a turn for the worse. Someone has kidnapped the sons of the Duchess Dianda Lorden, regent of the Undersea Duchy of Saltmist. To prevent a war between land and sea, Toby must not only find the missing boys, but also prove that the Queen of the Mists was not behind their abduction. She’ll need all her tricks and the help of her allies if she wants to make it through this in one piece.

Toby’s search will take her from the streets of San Francisco to the lands beneath the waves. But someone is determined to stop her—and whoever it is isn’t playing by Oberon’s Laws. As the battle grows more and more personal, one thing is chillingly clear. When Faerie goes to war, not everyone will walk away.

In One Salt Sea, we meet Dianda Lorden, one of my favorite side-characters of the series ever. She is a riot, even when we don’t see her at her finest moments in this book.

If you’ve read the series through, on rereading One Salt Sea you’ll find lots of little breadcrumbs leading us forward and tying the overarching plots of the series to One Salt Sea. Those little details that show us as readers just how intricately Seanan plotted this series. The foreshadowing is both heartbreaking and delicious, once you know what you’re looking at.

One Salt Sea proves to have one of the most controversial deaths in the series as well. I won’t tell you who, but it’s a character that I loved and enjoyed, that many fans of the series shrug at me. “I never really liked x anyway.” I still cry every time I read the scene.

One Salt Sea has consistently landed in my top 5 Toby books list. Some of my favorite scenes and lines come from One Salt Sea, even as some of the most heartbreaking parts of the series are also in here. It’s a book with a lot of emotional punch and feels like the tide being sucked out from the beach just before a tsunami. There is no calm before the storm.

Come back late next month for a review of Ashes of Honor, book #6 in the series. (Or if you can’t wait, join our discussion for that book Sunday, May 13!)