Brennan, Marie - Midnight Never Come

[oyceter]

Queen Elizabeth has been on the throne for a couple of decades, but no one knows that some of her success comes from a pact made with another queen—Invidiana, queen of faerie England. Soon, Michael Deven, a member of her court, and Lune, an out-of-favor lady from Invidiana's court, are working to find out exactly what binds the two queens together and why.

I enjoyed this a lot. It's got court politics and intrigue like whoa, but written in such a manner that it's very understandable to me while still being believably politic-y. I particularly liked learning more and more about Lune as we learned more and more about Faerie. And though I'm mostly tired of books about Faerie/fairies/the Fae/Sidhe/etc., the setting and politics of this were interesting enough to keep me engaged. It does have many of the standard Faerie trappings—fear of church bells, glamour, and etc.—and though Brennan doesn't deconstruct them, there are enough twists to entertain.

And apparently there's room for two Elizabethan books about Faerie, as this one reads very, very differently from The Perilous Gard.

I am still not quite sure what to make of the role Christianity plays. On the one hand, it's hard to have Faerie without a mention of church bells or teinds to hell. On the other, I'm not quite sure I fully bought the religious aspects, and whenever I read these books, I always wonder about other parts of the world and other religions and such. I mean, in the author's notes, Brennan clearly wants to limit the book to a particular time period and region, and I like the sense of Faerie scattered about Europe with different courts and such—faerie politics works very much like inter-country politics in Elizabethan England. Possibly I am just thinking too much about it.

Anyway, it's an engaging read.

Links:
- yhlee's review
- cofax7's review
- rushthatspeak's review

Comments

Question

[estara.livejournal.com]

To see three different views of Elizabethan Faerie, will you be reading Elizabeth Bear's version, too? As in Ink&Steel and Hell&Earth?
http://www.elizabethbear.com/inkandsteel1.html
http://www.elizabethbear.com/promethean.html

Re: Question

[oyceter]

I bounce off of Bear's books, so I think I'll be skipping those...

Re: Question

[estara.livejournal.com]

Fair enough ^^

[sarasusa.livejournal.com]

I was halfway through the review before I realized you weren't talking about Queen Elizabeth II. *d'oh*

But I'm fond of the Tudors as well, so I'll probably check this out. :-)

[oyceter]

Hee! See, that would be interesting, albeit with less period clothing ;).

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I think the problem with "Faerie/fairies/the Fae/Sidhe/etc.," is that so many authors just toss them in because they're "familiar," with without really making them pertinent, so we get irritated becaus it's there just to be there. (I have a similar problem with vampires and urban fantasy.)

I struggled a bit with the first 100 or so pages because it felt "politics first, story second" to me (good politics, but still...) but it's one of my favorite reads this year.

I think Brennan said at her LJ a while back that she plans to write a series touching on the court every 100 years.

[oyceter]

I think the reason faerie worked in here was Brennan's decision to limit it to a very specific area and mythology; it feels much less messy and more contained.

Hee, I loved the court workings, so that had me fascinated from the start.

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

I just read this a few days ago, and enjoyed it a lot. Mind you, I like both the Tudors and Faerie as topics to read about.

You're quite right about the abundance of books linking Elizabeth's court to Faerie dealings (Blame it on Spenser, he started it!) - Mercedes Lackey and Roberta Gillis have been writing a series based on the involvement of her conception of the sidhe in protecting the Tudor line, and Elizabeth Bear has a duology just out (Ink and Steel and Hell and Earth) that's set in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean England and also deals with the relationships between the human and fae courts.

I expect there are others I haven't heard of - it seems to have become a very popular concept of late.

[oyceter]

Yeah! I keep feeling like Elizabethan England is growing more popular as a setting in English-language fantasy right now, though I may be completely making that up and overlooking a ton of stuff.