With Fate Conspire by Marie Brennan
When I pick up a book set in Victorian England and purporting to have fairies in it I come to it with a few expectations regarding the social class of the people involved, the nature of the fairies, and the setting of the story involved. I have to report that With Fate Conspire managed to overturn each and every one of those expectations and I couldn't be happier about it.
So the story centers around Eliza, Irish and living in the poor parts of London, as she hunts for her childhood friend who was stolen by fairies. While this is going on, the Underground is in the process of construction and since there's I lot of Iron that goes into train tracks, this is causing some serious havoc with the local fairy court. Dead Rick is looking to take advantage of the uncertain atmosphere to get away from his master, Nadrett. Stuff happens.
I really liked this book. I loved how the factions of the fae kept undermining each other and that Dead Rick kept getting stuck in the middle of it. I found the technological links between the fae and more understood sciences interesting in how the fae aspect would play off some misconception of how a technology works in the real world. Actually the photography line that kept popping up was rather indicative of the story itself. All these layers upon layers that simultaneously reveal and obscure, tell the truth and lie through their images. The character's perception of reality and their memory of that perception was something that I thought could have been played with more, but that might be straying a little too far into the weird.
With regards to the characters, I liked Eliza's drive, but I was disappointed that she shut herself off from everyone else as much as she did. Dead Rick with his missing memory was a lot better in that respect. Even though his memory had been stolen, his friends from his old life didn't forget him and didn't abandon him once they found him in the first place. Actually overall, I was somewhat disappointed with the main-ish characters themselves, as I found the ideologies from the different political fronts far more interesting overall. It wasn't so much that they were terrible as much as there were other things that interested me more.
I enjoyed the solution immensely and found it an interesting use of technology, art, and their accessibility according to social standing. Since I fall rather firmly into the camp of “art should be accessible and legible to most people and outdoor sculpture is rubbish unless you can climb on it,” I found the solution sound and far more stable than their first draft.
Since there was a major focus on how the age of industrialization treated the working classes in both Faerie and in London it made for a nice change of pace, but because of that class division (or a character's perception of such) some characters would just end up stonewalling each other and nothing moved, particularly with regards to Eliza. This was less of an issue with the fae characters overall but then again they also had an obvious streak of gaming the rules and finding interesting and unexpected ways of bending them. Besides, steal-your-baby elves are universally more fun than hippie elves.
For the most part I really enjoyed what With Fate Conspire tried to do, enough that I was able to overlook the persistent boredom I had with some of the characters.
Mirrored at Deluded-visions.com