McGuire's Incrypid stories
Mar. 14th, 2014 05:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawylHaving enjoyed Seanan McGuire's Half-Off Ragnarok, I've been slotting the rest of her Incrypid stories into gaps in my reading schedule. The stores are smaller and more character focused than the novels, but they pack a lot of punch for their size.
While I liked them all, I thought the series of connected stories about Frances and Jonathan Healy — Alex, Verity and Antimony's great-grandparents — were particularly special. The core relationship between Fran and Jonathan, with all its ups and downs and deadpan jokes, is very well drawn and feels delightfully authentic. Which is largely why The First Fall is almost unbearably painful: the idea that, having got to know and like the Healys as a wonderfully determined and resourceful couple, they might end up as broken as anyone else carries such a lot of emotional weight.
What makes the whole enterprise deeply satisfying is the way it fleshes out the existing universe, giving a context for the Aeslin mice — surely one of McGuire's most inspired creations! — and gives the impression of a whole world heavy with history happening between, below and behind the lines of the three present-day Incryptid novels.
While I liked them all, I thought the series of connected stories about Frances and Jonathan Healy — Alex, Verity and Antimony's great-grandparents — were particularly special. The core relationship between Fran and Jonathan, with all its ups and downs and deadpan jokes, is very well drawn and feels delightfully authentic. Which is largely why The First Fall is almost unbearably painful: the idea that, having got to know and like the Healys as a wonderfully determined and resourceful couple, they might end up as broken as anyone else carries such a lot of emotional weight.
What makes the whole enterprise deeply satisfying is the way it fleshes out the existing universe, giving a context for the Aeslin mice — surely one of McGuire's most inspired creations! — and gives the impression of a whole world heavy with history happening between, below and behind the lines of the three present-day Incryptid novels.
