I was objectively too young when I picked up this book at like, ten or eleven, having just read Terri Windling and Ellen Steiber's The Raven Queen and wanting more faeries with some edge to them, and read my way through four novels about magic and fairies in Canada and Ireland. On that first read, solidly 80% of it went straight over my head, and I couldn't figure out why. (Reader, the reason is because I was a tiny human who was still at a middle grade level and this book is pretty firmly YA but literally nobody ever told me no where books were concerned--and thank you to everyone who supported my reading from a young age!) That said, there was something about the book that wouldn't stop worrying at the back of my mind, so over the next three years, I kept reading and rereading, and slowly the stories took shape in my head and I learned why the books stayed with me. I spent a long time with this book, so let's talk The Golden Book of Faerie.
This is a spoilery post, so be aware if this book is for some reason on your TBR!
A word I didn't know when I decided I wanted to read this book is omnibus, but that's what this book is--an omnibus edition of four OR Melling novels.
The Hunter's Moon is the first of the four books, and it really sets up the complex relationship between family and faerie that will permeate the rest of the books. It follows Gwen and Findabhair's (fin-ah-veer's) reunion in Ireland after a while apart, and Findabhair's entanglement with Finvarra, a faerie king. Finvarra either falls in love with/selects for the Hunter's Moon sacrifice Findabhair, and Findabhair decides she is in love enough to go through with it. Gwen basically decides that no, this is not acceptable, and finds help fron Dara, cute guy and folkloric king of Ireland; Granny (Grania Harte, not Granny Weatherwax) who is a fairy doctress; Katie Quirke, who is a farmer with big dreams; and Mattie O'Shea, a middle-aged Managing Director of a firm who is also a married new dad. I would be absolutely remiss to point out the resemblances to Lord of the Rings here, because Gwen quite literally pulls together a fellowship to try to save Findabhair and faerie.
The fellowship faces down Crom Cruac, the Great Worm. It...does not go great. I wasn't kidding when I made the LotR comparison, there is no great, glorious, heroic battle at the climax of this book. They are overpowered and beaten to a pulp, and Findabhair gets Laterose-ed into the ground, and suddenly the company's reason for fighting lies dying. Finvarra chooses a heroic sacrifice, and the rest of the company takes itself home to recover. A year and a day later, the Company of Seven gather again to mark to day, and Finvarra--a notably human Finvarra--returns.
The overarching mood of this story is of how love and grief intertwine, and it is really truly well done.
The Summer King shifts protagonists to focus on Laurel and Honor Blackburn, a pair of twin sisters violently separated by what seems, on the surface, to be a hang-glider accident. We find later that it was, in truth, a faery attack, but for the long year between Honor's death and Laurel's introduction to Faery, all Laurel knows is that her sister is dead. And the kicker for the family--although this is implied rather than stated explicitly on page--is that they didn't even have a body to bury because Honor crashed into water, and the glider took her too far down to be recovered.
Along for the ride with Laurel is Ian Gray, troubled young pastor's son and the new--and EXTREMELY reluctant--Summer King. He and Ian more share a body and mind than are the same person, so poor Ian is fighting a massive battle and Laurel is still so wounded by Honor's death. The pair bond a bit on Grace O'Malley's ship, and even when it is revealed that Honor was a casualty of the Summer King's violence, Laurel and Ian still work together to light the midsummer pyre and keep the human and faerie worlds together.
Dead is dead in the human world still, so Honor cannot return to her life. But thanks to Laurel, she can live on in Faerie. And Laurel also grows enough to pull Ian back from the edge as well.
So as the eldest of three girls, literally the worst thing I can imagine is losing a sister, so this book made me SOB. But the compassion required for forgiveness and healing stuck, and the book expands the theme of the intertwining of love and grief while giving it some nuance and complexity by weaving in compassion and forgiveness.
The Light-Bearer's Daughter is possibly the closest thing to a traditional "fairy tale" in this book, because Dana is all of eleven in this book, far younger than the teen protagonists of the last two. That is why when Dana stumbles ass-backwards into the woods and is handed a mission by the Summer Queen--none other than Honor Blackburn, for those of you playing along at home--she ends up terrifying her single dad by bailing on him right before a move from Ireland to Toronto to complete her mission.
This book is very much a fairy tale because it's Dana learning, growing, getting square with the fae mother who left her and her father, and then accepting the move to Canada. This is possibly my least favorite of the three novels, but it's important background for Dana for the next book.
The Book of Dreams takes Dana as its protagonist again, but now she is a troubled thirteen who has not adjusted to life in Toronto. It also weaves in the major players from the three previous books, because whether Dana is ready or not, something big enough to threaten the existence of faerie is coming, and Laurel and Gwen need to make sure that this teenager survives to battle this.
The best part of this book is how the mythology and lore expands. We get the Irish/English faerie lore that we've been accustomed to in three previous books, but thanks to the multiculturalness of Toronto, we also get First Nations and Indian (that's as in India, not as in Native American) lore as well, and the three work together beautifully. This was the first time I had ever seen Irish and North American Indigenous mythologies together, but CE Murphy does a version of it in the Walker Papers, and these two seem to work together really well.
I also love the way the different threads of this book weave together, although we are never free of the balance between love and grief and the costs of having a foot in both the mortal and faerie worlds.
Overall, despite being objectively too young for this book when I first picked it up, it was foundational in shaping what I prefer in faerie stories (and actually probably explains part of why how the fae in the Dresden Files are handled pisses me off) and it really helped show me that there was nothing that was too hard for me to read. It might take spending some time with a text and rereading and reflection to parse my responses, but this book really was my first experience with a challenging text that I had to work to really get through, understand, and appreciate.
It's the combination of the lesson on how to approach challenging texts and the vibes that I learned to appreciate that really made this book stick with me, and I adore The Hunter's Moon unreasonably.
Vows and Honor series by Mercedes Lackey (4⭐ overall)
The Druid’s Tune by O.R. Melling (re-read)
Technically I finished Vows and Honor this month but it’s easier just to put the series all together. It’s a good, solid Lackey series. There’s some questionable stuff but also challenges a lot of the “expected gender roles” in fantasy (including a nice bit about how some people want to be home-makers and that’s okay!).
Uprooted was great to re-read! I read it over 3 years ago and had forgotten most of it, so it was full of the same tension and build-up.
The Druid’s Tune is O.R. Melling’s first(?) book. Her later offerings are definitely better but this is a solid adventure and it has a lot of what she builds her later stories on. Fun, short book if you’re looking for a book that loves its Irish myth and history.
These books by OR Melling are one of the first that inspired me to read more. I loved the book so much I've used the main characters name from these books for my gamer tags and usernames. (Findabhair)
