Reading roundup: Foxglove Summer!
60. Ben Aaronovitch, Foxglove Summer (Peter Grant/RoL #5) -- So I was seeing all these reaction posts pop up on my flist, because people unfairly live in countries where they can walk into a store and buy this book BEFORE the UK release date, as opposed to having to wait until January, like here (though the US version -- now with actual pretty covers! -- has been dutifully preordered), and I was very heroically resisting reading any spoilers (asthenie_vd's personalized admonitions not to click helped XD), and then not one but two kind people took pity on me (<333, egelantier and meathiel) and supplied me with my fix, and I got it just in time to start reading on my commute back from Oregon Friday, and read it before going to bed, and as soon as I woke up Saturday, and, despite annoying interactions like having to do stuff with my kids or go see my parents or pretend to care about grown-up responsibilities, I finished it on Saturday just as B was turning off the lights. So, Foxglove Summer has been accomplished!
I... liked it? A lot, because it's a RoL book and still chock-full of cranberries, but also even relative to other books in the series, I think? I didn't love it as much as Broken Homes (which, I'm pretty sure, remains my favorite of the series), but my expectations were suitably adjuted by the blurb and by the non-spoilery warning that I wheedled out of sysann, and it was actually a good book, I think, if not exactly the book I would have liked to read in an ideal world where BA was writing books just for me (these are already pretty close...)
In spoilery detail:
Not enough Nightingale, but I knew that going in. The phone conversations weren't really enough for me, BUT on the other hand, finally getting the Ettersberg backstory (more or less) from Hugh was pretty awesome (and of course it would have to be someone other than Nightingale himself to tell Peter what happened). Nightingale as Ajax before the gates of Troy ("but Ajax covered the son of Menoitios with his broad shield and stood fast, like a lion over its children") is an image that I wish I could think of a way to fit on an icon, because I love it so.
And fandom I think in general predicted Ettersberg pretty well, or at least I was not surprised by the reveal, though I can't remember which fics or meta first postulated the idea that it was a raid to capture Nazi death magic experiments data. (I hadn't made the connection that the Black Library is probably what's behind the door at the Folly until I saw that mentioned in other reviews, but, yeah, that makes a lot of sense, both for why Nightingale would be so concerned about protecting it and why the Faceless Man would want it.) Some more interesting details on David Mellenby, too... And even more ~evidence for Nightingale/David Mellenby (even though BA apparently says he never meant Nightingale to read as queer? I'm not sure where he said that -- I've seen that pop up on anonymemes with no source, but, well... seeing as how that's pretty much universal canon, if not specifically the David Mellenby thing...) But I suppose Mellenby's suicide means he's not the Faceless Man, which was the other popular theory I saw floating around. (Unless Hugh is really misinformed / it was a faking your death thing because he wanted to work behind the scenes to further his ideas without the Nazi experimentation taint...? But that seems quite unlikely when the death in question is blowing one's brains out...)
Also, "Nightingale's starling" is pretty adorable. (Although I still think Peter's totem animal/animagus form/whatever is a magpie :P) And: "Tough and clever, that's what he always said he was looking for." Good choice, then! Speaking of the Folly, Peter speculating on Nightingale's contemporaries going grouse hunting with fireballs was cute, and magical boxing! (and the revelation that "only half [of Nightingale's] peers could perform while under physical stress" -- which Peter apparently can do decently well, so Nightingale knows how to pick (and train, probably) apprentices.
Also not enough Varvara. She has apparently become a key part of the series for me, in a single book. I would've totally loved seeing the comrade major tagging along on a life-changing fieldtrip to the English countryside (and probably making jokes/reminiscing about kolhozy while she was at it), but alas, earwax. I totally want missing scene fic for Nightingale and Peter trying to get her drunk to pump her for information (worst. plan. ever, guys), and volunteer to round up filthy Russian jokes that don't translate well for this purpose. Also, plz to be drawing Varvara "drinking black coffee and reading Cosmopolitan" at the Folly.
Lesley... I had no idea what to expect in Lesley development, and my expectations were leaning more towards complete silence on the subject than satisfactory resolution. So what we got was actually more than I was expecting, but I still have no idea what to make of it. I am by now pretty much convinced that, even if she's double-agenting, Nightingale knows nothing about it... and it's probably not a thing that has sanction from another portion of the Met, either (unless they really would use all those resources to chase a double-agent for verisimilitude?). I still don't believe that Lesley is the kind of person who would turn to the dark side for personal gain, so I guess I'm now falling on the side of something she decided to do on her own (maybe after trying to work it through official channels) to keep an eye on the Faceless Man? Her conversation with Peter was really painful, and the texts were just so weird in the disconnect between the mundanity of chatspeak and teasing and the fact that they were texting across enemy lines, basically, with the Met watching and Lesley being aware of it.
On the other hand, I unequivocally loved the way Peter thinks about Lesley -- the way he still reaches for her approaches and hears her voice when trying to think of what a good cop would do in whatever situation he finds himself in, and thinking that Lesley would be pissed at him for missing a critical detail -- with those thoughts being tinged with bitterness at the beginning ("Lesley always said that I wasn't suspicious enough to do the job properly, and tasered me in the back to drive the point home", "I asked myself what Lesley would do -- apart from taser me in the back and betray me to the Faceless Man, that is."), and then almost not... Maybe the primal scream therapy / tree-whacking really did help?
(And I liked that Peter had to be talked -- practically *forced* -- into expressing emotion, and that even while he was doing it, he was still covering it up with sarcasm: "Listen [...] I know you trees are up to something. [...] But you can't talk because you're a fucking tree, so really this whole fucking enhanced interrogation shit is a waste of time.") Actually, I was very skeptical when I started reading the tree-whacking scene, but was completely sold on it by the end, especially with "At some point the stick broke. There were probably manly tears." -- that was such a Peter way to sum up the whole thing after the brief, highly unusual glimpse into his actual feelings.)
Beverley, eh. She is still not a character I'm interested in at all, but I thought her presence would annoy me more than it ended up doing. Like, I could not be any less invested in her relationship with Peter, but he seems to be happy to be getting laid, so I can't really begrudge him that? But Beverley qua Beverley remains utterly uninteresting to me, although I did enjoy their discussion of acidic vs alkaline soil and Peter asking her whether the river-waking sex was like with frogs or what, because Peter being a science nerd is never not ador(k)able. Her Arwen moment (and I was totally thinking of it as that before Peter made the allusion; I guess he was too busy unicorn-evading at the time to think of it on the spot) was actually quite nice, but I'm less happy about the rescue at the end. There will probably be some justification for why it was her and not Nightingale in the next book, and thematically, it reminded me of Tam Lin and basically that whole tradition of a girl rescuing her love from the Queen of the Faeries, which is a trope that I love, but it didn't really work for me here.
I missed the home team in general -- not just Nightingale and Varvara, and Dr Walid (of whom we got a bit on the phone at least, and I noticed that Peter by now adresses him as Abdul, which I think might be new?), but also Stephanopoulos and Seawoll and Kumar and Abigail and everybody. Dominic was a pretty good substitution for the Met folks, though, and I liked him a lot. He and Peter have a very different dynamic than Peter does with the cops he normally works with ("'Special Air Service.' He grinned at the expression on my face. 'Finally,' he said. 'I was wondering if anything out here was going to impress you.'", "I worked six months on a pig farm. I have nothing to prove -- trust me.", "'Well, that explains a great deal,' I said. 'You always were suspiciously one step ahead of the rest of us.' 'That's not funny,' said Dominic, his face pale.", "What's with the 'we', kemosabe? I'm planning to blame you for everything.") but it was still one I liked, and I liked what we saw of Victor (Dom's modern farmer boyfriend with "the posh accent of someone who was privately educated but never got the memo about having to pretend to be just one of the blokes", who pretended to be a stockbroker when they met, and is happy to raise and slaughter animals but is himself a vegetarian), too. (Also, Peter seemed not at all thrown by being asked to consider if he would marry Victor, and came up with some upsides pretty quickly. I'm just sayin'.)
I wasn't sure how the transition from London to small town would work for me in this series, but it actually worked quite well. Peter continuously comparing wildlife sounds to movie/game soundtracks and power equipment noises while everybody around him supplied the names of lifeforms involved never got old for me. It was also interesting to see Peter stand out a lot more among the small town folks. Peter always remarks on the ethnicity of those he interacts with, but usually it's not "white" "white" "white" with everyone he meets like it was here -- well, he spotted a single mixed-race boy playing in the water during the side trip to visit the Welsh rivers. And there's the effect of that, from the unpleasant (the boys eyeing him menacingly) to the oblivious (a kid asking why he's brown and a witness asking Dominic if Peter is praying to Mecca when Peter is kneeling to feel for vestigia) to the friendly-jokey, like Dom making a quip about the heat ('"Hottest summer in living memory. [...] You should be right at home." I didn't even bother to give him the look -- it's not like he'd have understood what it meant anyway.') or having to be asked not to refer to magic as "voodoo shit", or even the way Peter wants to give the senior officer a gold star for managing to refer to Beverley as a "traditional spiritualist". (On that note, I quite like Beverley's "I'M FROM HERE STUPID" T-shirt). But the way Peter keeps mapping the big family gatherings onto ones of his own family (the way they distinguish cousins and so on) and feels like his mother would fit right in at the celebration of the girls' recovery -- except the food would be too bland -- made it not an us-vs-them kind of scenario, which was nice, too.
And I always like the way BA draws side characters, sometimes even characters who don't appear in the book at all, in the full glorious weirdness of life's diversity -- like the way Peter wonders if Andy knows Joanne and Derek are sleeping together and it's one of those arrangement, Sharon Pike the mind-whammied journalist who comes round pretty quickly and seems to be a nasty person who nevertheless does not try to shift more blame than is warranted, or even the professor and his wife and kids and undergraduate he cheated on the wife with who are all hanging out in the professor's villa in Tuscany.
Speaking of cop stuff, I continue to really love the way this so firmly remains a police procedural. Peter does not go haring off on his own -- with everything from Falcon/weird bollocks stuff to the conversations with Lesley, he gets authorization from his superiors, and records his actions, and calls for backup, and just... functions within the system in a way protagonists pretty much never do, and it's so refreshing, and also does not hamper his cleverness or bravery or anything at all.
I haven't talked about the case yet, but I actually really liked the case. Usually the mystery is the weakest part of the books for me, but here, it worked really well for me (and that was better in Broken Homes, too, so I think I am comfortable calling it a trend). There being specific victims who could still be saved rather than a murder investigation or trying to prevent further harm to unspecified and unknown people ratcheted up the stakes, and the whole changeling/stolen by faeries/invisible unicorn thing actually worked better for me than the other magical aspects (outside of formal magic) of the series so far. And I was happy to see that, unlike in Moon Over Soho, the problematic magical character (Nicole-who-was-raised-by-the-fae) is not conveniently killed off. If they do dump her on Fleet, I hope there is a lot of paperwork and follow-ups involved, so it's not just a different form of copout. Oh, and I guess we now know what Molly is, which I was never particularly wondering about, tbh, although I'm now even more curious about how she ended up in the Folly... The ending did feel really abrupt, both with Beverley's rescue and the way the story ends before Peter gets back to Nightingale, and I was definitely hoping for more story when I ran into the Acknowledgements instead. But up until then I had liked the pacing, which might actually be a first for this series. (And the rushed, smudged ending is doubtless an artifact of the hurry in which the book was finished, what with the multiple pushouts of the release date.)
But, actually, the thing I liked best about this book I haven't mentioned yet, and it was seeing how much Peter has matured, as a practitioner and a policeman, since the beginning of the series. I think we definitely needed a book with him operating on his own, away from his usual haunts, to show that, and now, after the thing with Lesley, was probably a really good time to do it, because it also gives him enough room and solitude for introspection, which does not come easily to Peter. It was great to see that, without Nightingale or another senior officer to guide him and without Lesley to keep him focused, Peter is pretty good at this policing stuff! He is still an out-of-the-box thinker and occasionally takes really big risks (like when volunteering to go with the Queen) -- or when having sex with Beverley in the river, which is less justified by altruism :P -- but mostly he thinks things through more than he used to, and he's come along very nicely in integrating the empirical, technological approach he gravitates to with what he's learned of magic. It was really good to see! And Peter dealing with grieving, worried parents really impressed me, and also the way he kept restraining himself from helping Hugh while really, really wanting to.
And because he was alone for a large part of the book, or at least not with people who he has an established way of playing off, I feel like we got a lot more of Peter himself than in the previous books. I don't know if it's a natural progression, or if BA is reacting to reader feedback that Peter feels oddly opaque, or if it's just that because the case revolves around children that we get more insights into Peter's childhood, but either way it worked for me. Nothing we learn is earth-shattering or particularly surprising, but it all adds up -- that Peter tried running away as a kid (with a PB&J sandwich and a copy of 2000AD) because of the situation with his father and feeling generally like his parents weren't there for him, his mother's tough love approach with corporal punishment and chores and prioritizing people who need things more (and I love the way some of this translates into Peter not being able to stand slovenliness in other people as a result of his upbringing; I don't remember noticing it as much before, but Peter doing Zoe's dishes and flinching at Beverley tossing dirty clothes on his bed were really nice details). And, like, I had not realized that he'd actually been to Sierra Leona before (albeit as a kid). I don't think Peter could've carried a book for me prior to, say, the end of Soho, but he absolutely can now, and so Foxglove Summer worked for me pretty well. (Also, speaking of Peter's emotional well-being, I found it quite wonderful the way everyone, from Nightingale to Lesley to Beverley was so obviously concerned about him and trying to look out for him in various ways.)
I always delight in the fannish references, and this book was no exception (we get an ASOIAF/GoT quote -- two, possibly, if "the night is dark and full of terrors" is one along with "Valar morghulis", and lots of references to Star Wars (Peter's ringtone, until he changes it to something that wouldn't sound flippant on a child abduction case) and Star Trek (the alert for detectors dropping off the grid) and of course Doctor Who (including Nigel Kneale, apparently? I had to google that one), but they also felt a bit more authorially forced her, and I'm not sure why. Maybe because he was pretty much making them on his own instead of having another person who gets his references to play off, like Lesley or Kumar? I mean, with Beverley, they do get into a pop-music reference-off ("My milkshake brings all the gods to the yard", etc.), but it's not quite the same. Also, apparently Peter has watched Hotel Transylvania at least once, because he could tell the movie was around the middle. But apparently he does not watch My Little Pony, since he had to google for Princess Luna. Also, Peter apparently liked the metaphysical poets? Or at least more than Henry James.
Also, was a Queen CD being the only one in Lilly's car a nod to Good Omens? (not one that Peter remarked on, and if he's read Discworld I have a hard time imagining that he didn't read Good Omens... but on the other hand, once you start bringing Gaiman into it, you really can't avoid Neverwhere references, so, maybe better not to go there. Let's assume Peter bounced off Gaiman for some reason :)
And Peter the science nerd is one of my favorite aspects of his character, so stuff like this was great: "That's sixty tonnes of water over a distance of thirty metres -- that's a lot of power, at least 70 megawatts -- about what you get from a jet engine at full throttle" (I love that he clearly calculated it! and looked up a real-world comparison), and "a unicorn, possibly only visible in moonlight -- the physics of which I didn't even want to think about"), and "the color was deifnitely beginning to edge into the red as whatever approached sucked up the magic and lowered the frequency of the emitted light" (magical Dopplering, woo!), and "I'm currently favouring the hypothesis that the moon has a seeming arbitrary effect on magic because it likes to piss me off." And, randomly, I 100% agree with Peter's views on aliens, which is not a surprise.
Random notes:
A clever anon pointed out that the books seem to be advancing through the arts (book 1 = drama, book 2 = painting (or sculpture? I forget), book 3 = music (jazz), book 4 = architecture), so I kept looking for an arts connection here, but there didn't seem to be one. A lot of architcture still, though. And a lot of foodieness, which continued to amuse me as it exasperated Peter.
My book seemed confused on whether Mellissa was supposed to be Hugh's daughter or granddaughter, and I haven't figured out if that's an editing oversight or something more... Mellissa (which means "bee, honey" -- I looked it up, but kind of suspected it, based on "miele" = honey in Latinate languages) is kind of an interesting addition to the worldbuilding anyway, and I wonder if we'll find out more about what she is / how she works at some point. (And I liked Beverley's point bout supernatural etiquette, too, asking her if she'd noticed anything without referencing her connection with the bees specifically.)
These books continue to expand my British English vocabulary. In this one, I learned "lollipop lady" (we just call them crossing guards, but that's so much better!) and "sausage bags" (which would be a duffel bag here but I prefer sausage by far!), and "dogging", and "kissing teeth" as an expression for the tsk sound (which I did not realize was an African/Caribbean thing until I googled it), and also "gleckit" (which I know is Scottish, and apparently means "foolish").
Also! The whole meat-eating unicorn thing made me think of Rampant's killer unicorns, and now I really, really want Peter and Astrid to meet and be science-minded dorks at each other.
Quotes:
'"He [Hugh] survived Ettersberg?"
Nightingale looked away. "He made it back to England," he said. "But he suffered from what I'm told is now called post-traumatic stress disorder."'
"country so photogenically rural that I half-expected to meet Bilbo Baggins around the next corner -- providing he'd taken to driving a Nissan Micra."
"agricultural vehicle theft -- a top of the line tractor being more expensive than a Lamborghini and much easier to sell in Eastern Europe."
"members of the public have an unnerving tendency to switch straight from lying to your face to telling you what they think you want to hear -- with no intervening period of veracity at all."
'"A quick word with the river?" asked Dominic once Beverley was gone.
"I'd tell you, but then you'd have to section me," I said.'
"stuck in that strange state where the memory of your dreams is still powerful enough to motivate your actions."
"The role of which [the Forestry Commission] was to deal with the fact the UK was in dangerof losing its forests which were, back then, a strategic national resource on account of the fact you needed it to make stuff. This being before Ikea turned up backed by the limitless expanse of the Swedish forests, fabled home to fascist biker gangs, depressed detectives and werewolves."
"Then, 6000 years ago, farmers turned up with their fancy genetically modified crops and started clearing the forest out. And what they didn't clear got eaten away by their artificially mutated cattle, sheep and goats."
"a meat-eating unicorn that was blissed out on Benzedrine and diazepam and agricultural diesel oil" <-- pretty much why I love these books XP
"my mum never saw a gift horse that she wouldn't take down to the vet to have its mouth X-rayed -- if only so she could establish its resale value."
"Dominic who, I realised, had left the Boy Scout scale behind and was now verging on Batman levels of crazy preparedness."
"So I did it. Because I'm a sworn constable and it was the right thing to do.
Plus I fully expected Nightingale to come rescue me."
"Fuck me [...] I'm in fairyland."
I... liked it? A lot, because it's a RoL book and still chock-full of cranberries, but also even relative to other books in the series, I think? I didn't love it as much as Broken Homes (which, I'm pretty sure, remains my favorite of the series), but my expectations were suitably adjuted by the blurb and by the non-spoilery warning that I wheedled out of sysann, and it was actually a good book, I think, if not exactly the book I would have liked to read in an ideal world where BA was writing books just for me (these are already pretty close...)
In spoilery detail:
Not enough Nightingale, but I knew that going in. The phone conversations weren't really enough for me, BUT on the other hand, finally getting the Ettersberg backstory (more or less) from Hugh was pretty awesome (and of course it would have to be someone other than Nightingale himself to tell Peter what happened). Nightingale as Ajax before the gates of Troy ("but Ajax covered the son of Menoitios with his broad shield and stood fast, like a lion over its children") is an image that I wish I could think of a way to fit on an icon, because I love it so.
And fandom I think in general predicted Ettersberg pretty well, or at least I was not surprised by the reveal, though I can't remember which fics or meta first postulated the idea that it was a raid to capture Nazi death magic experiments data. (I hadn't made the connection that the Black Library is probably what's behind the door at the Folly until I saw that mentioned in other reviews, but, yeah, that makes a lot of sense, both for why Nightingale would be so concerned about protecting it and why the Faceless Man would want it.) Some more interesting details on David Mellenby, too... And even more ~evidence for Nightingale/David Mellenby (even though BA apparently says he never meant Nightingale to read as queer? I'm not sure where he said that -- I've seen that pop up on anonymemes with no source, but, well... seeing as how that's pretty much universal canon, if not specifically the David Mellenby thing...) But I suppose Mellenby's suicide means he's not the Faceless Man, which was the other popular theory I saw floating around. (Unless Hugh is really misinformed / it was a faking your death thing because he wanted to work behind the scenes to further his ideas without the Nazi experimentation taint...? But that seems quite unlikely when the death in question is blowing one's brains out...)
Also, "Nightingale's starling" is pretty adorable. (Although I still think Peter's totem animal/animagus form/whatever is a magpie :P) And: "Tough and clever, that's what he always said he was looking for." Good choice, then! Speaking of the Folly, Peter speculating on Nightingale's contemporaries going grouse hunting with fireballs was cute, and magical boxing! (and the revelation that "only half [of Nightingale's] peers could perform while under physical stress" -- which Peter apparently can do decently well, so Nightingale knows how to pick (and train, probably) apprentices.
Also not enough Varvara. She has apparently become a key part of the series for me, in a single book. I would've totally loved seeing the comrade major tagging along on a life-changing fieldtrip to the English countryside (and probably making jokes/reminiscing about kolhozy while she was at it), but alas, earwax. I totally want missing scene fic for Nightingale and Peter trying to get her drunk to pump her for information (worst. plan. ever, guys), and volunteer to round up filthy Russian jokes that don't translate well for this purpose. Also, plz to be drawing Varvara "drinking black coffee and reading Cosmopolitan" at the Folly.
Lesley... I had no idea what to expect in Lesley development, and my expectations were leaning more towards complete silence on the subject than satisfactory resolution. So what we got was actually more than I was expecting, but I still have no idea what to make of it. I am by now pretty much convinced that, even if she's double-agenting, Nightingale knows nothing about it... and it's probably not a thing that has sanction from another portion of the Met, either (unless they really would use all those resources to chase a double-agent for verisimilitude?). I still don't believe that Lesley is the kind of person who would turn to the dark side for personal gain, so I guess I'm now falling on the side of something she decided to do on her own (maybe after trying to work it through official channels) to keep an eye on the Faceless Man? Her conversation with Peter was really painful, and the texts were just so weird in the disconnect between the mundanity of chatspeak and teasing and the fact that they were texting across enemy lines, basically, with the Met watching and Lesley being aware of it.
On the other hand, I unequivocally loved the way Peter thinks about Lesley -- the way he still reaches for her approaches and hears her voice when trying to think of what a good cop would do in whatever situation he finds himself in, and thinking that Lesley would be pissed at him for missing a critical detail -- with those thoughts being tinged with bitterness at the beginning ("Lesley always said that I wasn't suspicious enough to do the job properly, and tasered me in the back to drive the point home", "I asked myself what Lesley would do -- apart from taser me in the back and betray me to the Faceless Man, that is."), and then almost not... Maybe the primal scream therapy / tree-whacking really did help?
(And I liked that Peter had to be talked -- practically *forced* -- into expressing emotion, and that even while he was doing it, he was still covering it up with sarcasm: "Listen [...] I know you trees are up to something. [...] But you can't talk because you're a fucking tree, so really this whole fucking enhanced interrogation shit is a waste of time.") Actually, I was very skeptical when I started reading the tree-whacking scene, but was completely sold on it by the end, especially with "At some point the stick broke. There were probably manly tears." -- that was such a Peter way to sum up the whole thing after the brief, highly unusual glimpse into his actual feelings.)
Beverley, eh. She is still not a character I'm interested in at all, but I thought her presence would annoy me more than it ended up doing. Like, I could not be any less invested in her relationship with Peter, but he seems to be happy to be getting laid, so I can't really begrudge him that? But Beverley qua Beverley remains utterly uninteresting to me, although I did enjoy their discussion of acidic vs alkaline soil and Peter asking her whether the river-waking sex was like with frogs or what, because Peter being a science nerd is never not ador(k)able. Her Arwen moment (and I was totally thinking of it as that before Peter made the allusion; I guess he was too busy unicorn-evading at the time to think of it on the spot) was actually quite nice, but I'm less happy about the rescue at the end. There will probably be some justification for why it was her and not Nightingale in the next book, and thematically, it reminded me of Tam Lin and basically that whole tradition of a girl rescuing her love from the Queen of the Faeries, which is a trope that I love, but it didn't really work for me here.
I missed the home team in general -- not just Nightingale and Varvara, and Dr Walid (of whom we got a bit on the phone at least, and I noticed that Peter by now adresses him as Abdul, which I think might be new?), but also Stephanopoulos and Seawoll and Kumar and Abigail and everybody. Dominic was a pretty good substitution for the Met folks, though, and I liked him a lot. He and Peter have a very different dynamic than Peter does with the cops he normally works with ("'Special Air Service.' He grinned at the expression on my face. 'Finally,' he said. 'I was wondering if anything out here was going to impress you.'", "I worked six months on a pig farm. I have nothing to prove -- trust me.", "'Well, that explains a great deal,' I said. 'You always were suspiciously one step ahead of the rest of us.' 'That's not funny,' said Dominic, his face pale.", "What's with the 'we', kemosabe? I'm planning to blame you for everything.") but it was still one I liked, and I liked what we saw of Victor (Dom's modern farmer boyfriend with "the posh accent of someone who was privately educated but never got the memo about having to pretend to be just one of the blokes", who pretended to be a stockbroker when they met, and is happy to raise and slaughter animals but is himself a vegetarian), too. (Also, Peter seemed not at all thrown by being asked to consider if he would marry Victor, and came up with some upsides pretty quickly. I'm just sayin'.)
I wasn't sure how the transition from London to small town would work for me in this series, but it actually worked quite well. Peter continuously comparing wildlife sounds to movie/game soundtracks and power equipment noises while everybody around him supplied the names of lifeforms involved never got old for me. It was also interesting to see Peter stand out a lot more among the small town folks. Peter always remarks on the ethnicity of those he interacts with, but usually it's not "white" "white" "white" with everyone he meets like it was here -- well, he spotted a single mixed-race boy playing in the water during the side trip to visit the Welsh rivers. And there's the effect of that, from the unpleasant (the boys eyeing him menacingly) to the oblivious (a kid asking why he's brown and a witness asking Dominic if Peter is praying to Mecca when Peter is kneeling to feel for vestigia) to the friendly-jokey, like Dom making a quip about the heat ('"Hottest summer in living memory. [...] You should be right at home." I didn't even bother to give him the look -- it's not like he'd have understood what it meant anyway.') or having to be asked not to refer to magic as "voodoo shit", or even the way Peter wants to give the senior officer a gold star for managing to refer to Beverley as a "traditional spiritualist". (On that note, I quite like Beverley's "I'M FROM HERE STUPID" T-shirt). But the way Peter keeps mapping the big family gatherings onto ones of his own family (the way they distinguish cousins and so on) and feels like his mother would fit right in at the celebration of the girls' recovery -- except the food would be too bland -- made it not an us-vs-them kind of scenario, which was nice, too.
And I always like the way BA draws side characters, sometimes even characters who don't appear in the book at all, in the full glorious weirdness of life's diversity -- like the way Peter wonders if Andy knows Joanne and Derek are sleeping together and it's one of those arrangement, Sharon Pike the mind-whammied journalist who comes round pretty quickly and seems to be a nasty person who nevertheless does not try to shift more blame than is warranted, or even the professor and his wife and kids and undergraduate he cheated on the wife with who are all hanging out in the professor's villa in Tuscany.
Speaking of cop stuff, I continue to really love the way this so firmly remains a police procedural. Peter does not go haring off on his own -- with everything from Falcon/weird bollocks stuff to the conversations with Lesley, he gets authorization from his superiors, and records his actions, and calls for backup, and just... functions within the system in a way protagonists pretty much never do, and it's so refreshing, and also does not hamper his cleverness or bravery or anything at all.
I haven't talked about the case yet, but I actually really liked the case. Usually the mystery is the weakest part of the books for me, but here, it worked really well for me (and that was better in Broken Homes, too, so I think I am comfortable calling it a trend). There being specific victims who could still be saved rather than a murder investigation or trying to prevent further harm to unspecified and unknown people ratcheted up the stakes, and the whole changeling/stolen by faeries/invisible unicorn thing actually worked better for me than the other magical aspects (outside of formal magic) of the series so far. And I was happy to see that, unlike in Moon Over Soho, the problematic magical character (Nicole-who-was-raised-by-the-fae) is not conveniently killed off. If they do dump her on Fleet, I hope there is a lot of paperwork and follow-ups involved, so it's not just a different form of copout. Oh, and I guess we now know what Molly is, which I was never particularly wondering about, tbh, although I'm now even more curious about how she ended up in the Folly... The ending did feel really abrupt, both with Beverley's rescue and the way the story ends before Peter gets back to Nightingale, and I was definitely hoping for more story when I ran into the Acknowledgements instead. But up until then I had liked the pacing, which might actually be a first for this series. (And the rushed, smudged ending is doubtless an artifact of the hurry in which the book was finished, what with the multiple pushouts of the release date.)
But, actually, the thing I liked best about this book I haven't mentioned yet, and it was seeing how much Peter has matured, as a practitioner and a policeman, since the beginning of the series. I think we definitely needed a book with him operating on his own, away from his usual haunts, to show that, and now, after the thing with Lesley, was probably a really good time to do it, because it also gives him enough room and solitude for introspection, which does not come easily to Peter. It was great to see that, without Nightingale or another senior officer to guide him and without Lesley to keep him focused, Peter is pretty good at this policing stuff! He is still an out-of-the-box thinker and occasionally takes really big risks (like when volunteering to go with the Queen) -- or when having sex with Beverley in the river, which is less justified by altruism :P -- but mostly he thinks things through more than he used to, and he's come along very nicely in integrating the empirical, technological approach he gravitates to with what he's learned of magic. It was really good to see! And Peter dealing with grieving, worried parents really impressed me, and also the way he kept restraining himself from helping Hugh while really, really wanting to.
And because he was alone for a large part of the book, or at least not with people who he has an established way of playing off, I feel like we got a lot more of Peter himself than in the previous books. I don't know if it's a natural progression, or if BA is reacting to reader feedback that Peter feels oddly opaque, or if it's just that because the case revolves around children that we get more insights into Peter's childhood, but either way it worked for me. Nothing we learn is earth-shattering or particularly surprising, but it all adds up -- that Peter tried running away as a kid (with a PB&J sandwich and a copy of 2000AD) because of the situation with his father and feeling generally like his parents weren't there for him, his mother's tough love approach with corporal punishment and chores and prioritizing people who need things more (and I love the way some of this translates into Peter not being able to stand slovenliness in other people as a result of his upbringing; I don't remember noticing it as much before, but Peter doing Zoe's dishes and flinching at Beverley tossing dirty clothes on his bed were really nice details). And, like, I had not realized that he'd actually been to Sierra Leona before (albeit as a kid). I don't think Peter could've carried a book for me prior to, say, the end of Soho, but he absolutely can now, and so Foxglove Summer worked for me pretty well. (Also, speaking of Peter's emotional well-being, I found it quite wonderful the way everyone, from Nightingale to Lesley to Beverley was so obviously concerned about him and trying to look out for him in various ways.)
I always delight in the fannish references, and this book was no exception (we get an ASOIAF/GoT quote -- two, possibly, if "the night is dark and full of terrors" is one along with "Valar morghulis", and lots of references to Star Wars (Peter's ringtone, until he changes it to something that wouldn't sound flippant on a child abduction case) and Star Trek (the alert for detectors dropping off the grid) and of course Doctor Who (including Nigel Kneale, apparently? I had to google that one), but they also felt a bit more authorially forced her, and I'm not sure why. Maybe because he was pretty much making them on his own instead of having another person who gets his references to play off, like Lesley or Kumar? I mean, with Beverley, they do get into a pop-music reference-off ("My milkshake brings all the gods to the yard", etc.), but it's not quite the same. Also, apparently Peter has watched Hotel Transylvania at least once, because he could tell the movie was around the middle. But apparently he does not watch My Little Pony, since he had to google for Princess Luna. Also, Peter apparently liked the metaphysical poets? Or at least more than Henry James.
Also, was a Queen CD being the only one in Lilly's car a nod to Good Omens? (not one that Peter remarked on, and if he's read Discworld I have a hard time imagining that he didn't read Good Omens... but on the other hand, once you start bringing Gaiman into it, you really can't avoid Neverwhere references, so, maybe better not to go there. Let's assume Peter bounced off Gaiman for some reason :)
And Peter the science nerd is one of my favorite aspects of his character, so stuff like this was great: "That's sixty tonnes of water over a distance of thirty metres -- that's a lot of power, at least 70 megawatts -- about what you get from a jet engine at full throttle" (I love that he clearly calculated it! and looked up a real-world comparison), and "a unicorn, possibly only visible in moonlight -- the physics of which I didn't even want to think about"), and "the color was deifnitely beginning to edge into the red as whatever approached sucked up the magic and lowered the frequency of the emitted light" (magical Dopplering, woo!), and "I'm currently favouring the hypothesis that the moon has a seeming arbitrary effect on magic because it likes to piss me off." And, randomly, I 100% agree with Peter's views on aliens, which is not a surprise.
Random notes:
A clever anon pointed out that the books seem to be advancing through the arts (book 1 = drama, book 2 = painting (or sculpture? I forget), book 3 = music (jazz), book 4 = architecture), so I kept looking for an arts connection here, but there didn't seem to be one. A lot of architcture still, though. And a lot of foodieness, which continued to amuse me as it exasperated Peter.
My book seemed confused on whether Mellissa was supposed to be Hugh's daughter or granddaughter, and I haven't figured out if that's an editing oversight or something more... Mellissa (which means "bee, honey" -- I looked it up, but kind of suspected it, based on "miele" = honey in Latinate languages) is kind of an interesting addition to the worldbuilding anyway, and I wonder if we'll find out more about what she is / how she works at some point. (And I liked Beverley's point bout supernatural etiquette, too, asking her if she'd noticed anything without referencing her connection with the bees specifically.)
These books continue to expand my British English vocabulary. In this one, I learned "lollipop lady" (we just call them crossing guards, but that's so much better!) and "sausage bags" (which would be a duffel bag here but I prefer sausage by far!), and "dogging", and "kissing teeth" as an expression for the tsk sound (which I did not realize was an African/Caribbean thing until I googled it), and also "gleckit" (which I know is Scottish, and apparently means "foolish").
Also! The whole meat-eating unicorn thing made me think of Rampant's killer unicorns, and now I really, really want Peter and Astrid to meet and be science-minded dorks at each other.
Quotes:
'"He [Hugh] survived Ettersberg?"
Nightingale looked away. "He made it back to England," he said. "But he suffered from what I'm told is now called post-traumatic stress disorder."'
"country so photogenically rural that I half-expected to meet Bilbo Baggins around the next corner -- providing he'd taken to driving a Nissan Micra."
"agricultural vehicle theft -- a top of the line tractor being more expensive than a Lamborghini and much easier to sell in Eastern Europe."
"members of the public have an unnerving tendency to switch straight from lying to your face to telling you what they think you want to hear -- with no intervening period of veracity at all."
'"A quick word with the river?" asked Dominic once Beverley was gone.
"I'd tell you, but then you'd have to section me," I said.'
"stuck in that strange state where the memory of your dreams is still powerful enough to motivate your actions."
"The role of which [the Forestry Commission] was to deal with the fact the UK was in dangerof losing its forests which were, back then, a strategic national resource on account of the fact you needed it to make stuff. This being before Ikea turned up backed by the limitless expanse of the Swedish forests, fabled home to fascist biker gangs, depressed detectives and werewolves."
"Then, 6000 years ago, farmers turned up with their fancy genetically modified crops and started clearing the forest out. And what they didn't clear got eaten away by their artificially mutated cattle, sheep and goats."
"a meat-eating unicorn that was blissed out on Benzedrine and diazepam and agricultural diesel oil" <-- pretty much why I love these books XP
"my mum never saw a gift horse that she wouldn't take down to the vet to have its mouth X-rayed -- if only so she could establish its resale value."
"Dominic who, I realised, had left the Boy Scout scale behind and was now verging on Batman levels of crazy preparedness."
"So I did it. Because I'm a sworn constable and it was the right thing to do.
Plus I fully expected Nightingale to come rescue me."
"Fuck me [...] I'm in fairyland."