Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire) wrote,
Seanan McGuire
seanan_mcguire
  • Mood: awake
  • Music: Amal and Stuart making brekkie.

THE WINTER LONG open thread!

To celebrate the release of The Winter Long, here. Have an open thread to discuss the book. Judging by the comments I'm seeing, some of you have had time, and I'd really, really rather book discussion (sometimes including spoilers) didn't crop up on other posts.

THERE WILL BE SPOILERS.

Seriously. If anyone comments here at all, THERE WILL BE SPOILERS. So please don't read and then yell at me because you encountered spoilers. You were warned. (I will not reply to every comment; I call partial comment amnesty. But I may well join some of the discussion, or answer questions or whatnot.) I will be DELETING all comments containing spoilers which have been left on other posts. No one gets to spoil people here without a label.

You can also start a discussion at my website forums, with less need to be concerned that I will see everything you say! In case you wanted, you know, discussion free of authorial influence, since I always wind up getting involved in these things.

Have fun, and try not to bleed on the carpet.
Tags: discussion post, the winter long, toby daye
  • Post a new comment

    Error

    Anonymous comments are disabled in this journal

    switch
    default userpic

    Your reply will be screened

    Your IP address will be recorded 

    Help
  • 336 comments
...go 1 level up... Expand

kalenodonnell

September 3 2014, 06:02:36 UTC 2 years ago


And on a tangential note - is it just me, or is anyone else wondering if somehow, in some way, August isn't October's half-sister, but in fact is October herself? (Or the other way around, more accurately). Not sure how this would work yet, and just a hunch based on a bunch of random observations, but....Simon made it clear that Amandine was as obsessed with finding or regaining their daughter as he was. They just took extremely different views of how to go about that. Add to that the way Evening almost seemed to go back and forth as to whether she viewed Toby as mortal, a changeling, or full Faerie. Sometimes she was saying Toby was one thing, sometimes the other, but there was a definite thread of 'just how mortal are you, Toby, if at all' in there. Something that was supported by a couple of things said by other characters throughout the narrative too. And also Amandine's insistence that Sylvester leave her alone while she raised Toby with Toby's human father, that she wasn't to be interfered with until she was ready to come back to Faerie on her own terms....

Fact is, we don't really have any idea of what Amandine and Toby are actually capable of, and neither do most of the other characters I think. Plenty of characters remember Amandine being pregnant with Toby, Evening makes a point of saying she was at Toby's christening herself....but what if August did die, and Amandine somehow used her magic to retain the essence of August's blood and put it into her new unborn child? I'm not sure how that would work yet exactly, but I feel like maybe there's something there, like Toby was somehow meant to be August reborn, like while pregnant with her Amandine altered her blood (and blood magic according to this book is the magic of memory and theft) and mixed the essence of her lost child into her new one?

angelamaria

September 3 2014, 08:49:28 UTC 2 years ago

I did also initially think that maybe Simon was October's real father, but for some reason made out to be fathered by a mortal man. That's confusing and sounds really complicated (i.e. removing one blood and adding another) but I suppose not impossible if Amandine really wanted to do it. Your theory of "transplanting" her into her unborn child sounds more plausible, maybe similar to how April has been transplanted into computers. Maybe that's also partly the reason why her Fetch eventually stayed--because October was essentially two people in one body, regardless of how well-melded they (August/October) were.

Still, if Amandine wanted to preserve August that much--after all, she started off by trying to find August by any means possible--why did she want to turn October fully mortal? That would pretty much mean October just lives a mortal life span and dies.

dornbeast

September 3 2014, 09:22:18 UTC 2 years ago

why did she want to turn October fully mortal?

"I was going to make sure Faerie never had the chance to hurt her." - Amandine, in Never Shines the Sun.

If we take her at her word (and the Luidaeg does), she thought she was protecting October from something - perhaps the same threat that August met.

Maybe she just wanted one child she could keep, even if she lost that child to old age before a century passed.

angelamaria

September 3 2014, 09:38:30 UTC 2 years ago

Yes, I remember that (Amandine wanting to make sure Faerie would not hurt October) although my question was more of "if she went through all the trouble of putting August in her new unborn child, why would then she try to turn that child (presumably, to her eyes, still August) human?" Although I suppose the argument (she would prefer October/August to die of old age than to be with her forever) still holds even then. A second chance at life, so to speak.