Midnight Never Come (Onyx Court 1)

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In short, I thoroughly enjoyed this book – court intrigue, just enough historical stress, characters that I love and a version of fairies that I can get behind. Now please let me see more of the weird creatures, Brennan. Set during the reign of Elizabeth I, Midnight Never Come tells of two Englands: one a realm of mortals ruled by Elizabeth, and one a realm of fairies, ruled by the heartless and exceedingly ruthless Invidiana. The two realms and the two rulers are linked by a pact which brought both queens to their thrones. But while Elizabeth has no interest in interfering with Invidiana and her subjects, the fairy queen’s agenda leads her to both help and hinder Elizabeth. She has spies in the mortal court, and has manipulated events in such a way that Elizabeth has sometimes had no choice but to act as Invidiana chooses, not as she would choose herself.

At first, it all seemed to be meandering along without much of a point. There's a tingle of mystery with the mostly-nonsense-but-sometimes-lucid babbling of Tiresias, the fae court's local mortal-turned-nutjob-from-overexposure, but aside from that, the plot itself wasn't particularly evident. The faerie court is ruled by the tyrannical Queen Invidiana. Her court is attended by the Lady Lune, who is recently fallen out of Invidiana’s favor. Lune negotiated a pact with the sea folk to assist the mortal court in the defeat of the Spanish, but overstepped her boundaries when she promised peace. Lune is ostracized by Invidiana, but nobly wants to regain favor. In so doing, she takes a task to infiltrate the court of Queen Elizabeth by assuming the identity of Anne Montrose. Evangelical Christians are used to thinking that there is a spiritual realm that overlays the physical world that we see and that angelic and demonic powers are contending with the people who govern to affect the affairs of the world. This book (and all of the books in the Onyx Court series) take a similar view of the world, substituting the Fae for angels and demons.Finished it in two days of intermittent reading, could NOT put it down. What an amazing book. The character arcs in this are absolutely insane. Galen and Irrith and Delphia and Lune, everyone has such an AMAZING arc and they all conclude so satisfyingly and jesus. The book kept me guessing the whole time about how it was going to end, only it ended up going in a COMPLETELY different direction that I was totally unprepared for and oh lordy. Parts of the book were a bit of a slog however. It's not quite clear to the reader when the human events are mirrored in fairy, and when the mirroring goes the other way, with fairy activities shaping the human world. The book would have more emotional punch if the causal structure were made clear -- that would give us a better sense what the stakes are. Second, I'm unfairly suspicious of novels involving fairies, because I'm always afraid they'll be twee. These fairies are about as un-twee as you can get, while still being very definitely magical. I particularly liked that these fairies are multicultural (a Greek centaur and an Arab djinn feature in the book), that they have internal politics, and that their interaction with the mortal world is a bit more complicated than them just having fun messing with mortals' heads. (Don't worry - they definitely have fun messing with mortals' heads. But there's more to it than that.) 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. Midnight Never Come: Takes place during the late Elizbethan period and tells the story of Michael Deven, courtier to Queen Elizabeth, and Lune, courtier to Invidiana, faerie queen of the Onyx Court and Elizabeth's dark shadow. Deven and Lune must come together to free England and Elizabeth from Invidiana's hold over them.

It’s a fascinating world. The details of the Onyx Court and its magic, the rituals of faerie, the intertwining of human and fae history. The third book, A Star Shall Fall, comes out on August 31 of this year. The middle of the 17th Century was not kind to England. Charles I Stuart was a poor king; Scotland was in turmoil; Ireland threatened to revolt; Civil War tore the country to shreds over (mostly) religious differences, leading to the execution of Charles and the fleeing of his son to the Continent; The Cromwellian Protectorate led the country further into ruin; the Plague killed thousands in 1665/6; wars with the Dutch waxed and waned; and then the Great Fire of 1666 destroyed 80% of "inner" London (that portion within the old Roman walls) as well as a large chunk to the west of the wall. Brennan’s mastery of mixing history with her faerie world was tested in Midnight Never Come. But as important as the history was Brennan was free their to build a love story around the events without the being tied too strongly to fixed dates and events. Though Ashes was a little disappointing in consequence, this one really works. An ambitious tale and a pleasing triumph. Wonderful.Two courtiers, both struggling for royal favor, are about to uncover the secrets that lie behind these two thrones. When the faerie lady Lune is sent to monitor and manipulate Elizabeth's spymaster, Walsingham, her path crosses that of Michael Deven, a mortal gentleman and agent of Walsingham's. His discovery of the "hidden player" in English politics will test Lune's loyalty and Deven's courage alike. Will she betray her Queen for the sake of a world that is not hers? And can he survive in the alien and Machiavellian world of the fae? For only together will they be able to find the source of Invidiana's power—find it, and break it… This was a sad one, ok now you think omg am I gonna cry? Haha, no, I do not mean SAD, just you know melancholic. The Fae have lived and loved London, but the iron has poisoned Father Thames. The railway is destroying more and more. The Onyx court is dying, iron is everywhere. And I do like the Fae, even if they have their share of rotten eggs too. And the Court is desperately trying to find a way to survive.... J'ai fini par m'arrêter et comme il est difficile de choisir quand on a l'auteur en face de soi, j'ai réduit le choix en demandant ce qui restait en anglais. Il n'en restait qu'un : les quatrième tome de la série Onyx Hall. Heureusement, ils peuvent se lire indépendamment les uns des autres. Vendu ; emballez, c'est pesé!

This is a very beautiful book. I say that meaning the literal aesthetic. The cover is super pretty, and the idea just appeals to me so much. Faeries and Tudors! This book sounds like it was made for me. And the faeries themselves were pretty cool - twisty and magical and dark and interesting. I loved reading about them! I wanted to know more about the hidden courts and the faeries that lived far from the mortal world. I wanted there to be some more rich world building and for this to be a big, beautiful, sprawling fantasy novel. Unfortunately, we didn't quite get there. The crisis here for the Faerie world is a fundamental one: one of science versus magic, of rationalism versus mysticism. As the world above becomes more concerned with facts, there becomes less room for the superstition and the supernatural of the world below. This is the crisis that Lune faces, because she is aware, unlike the world above, that the two co-exist. It is further echoed in the fact that as the Onyx Court is fraying at its edges, Lune’s monarchy is under threat from a rival group, the Sanists, who feel that Lune needs replacing. Firstly, Midnight Never Come is my kind of story – Elizabethan historical fantasy. And Brennan really gets it right. The detail and accuracy of this story is phenomenal. I can’t imagine exactly how much research when into this, but I bet it took more time to research the story than to actually write it. The ending through me for... a loop, too. Because up until this point, these books have been almost TOO loyal to history. The sudden jump over to things that never really happened was a weird choice.My least favorite of the Onyx Court books. I really liked the premise of this book, that of visiting the darker, seedier underside of both London and the Onyx Court, but I felt that the book fell flat. I was also surprised by how much swearing was in this book, because there is quite a lot, and I don't remember any in the previous books. Finally, after spending time trying to conceptualize my review of Midnight Never Come, I have come up with the perfect metaphor for how I feel about this book. I feel like a Chopped judge (I’m sorry for anyone who hasn’t stumbled upon the food network and watched the show). Not just any Chopped judge, mind you, but one who has been presented with a plate of food described as one thing and after one bite the judge knows that that description is untrue. In plainer terms: they’ve been fed a big spiel of crap. It was the ending, really, which decided me to give this 3 stars. It was pretty much a 2 star book before then - and, as always, I reserve the right to change my rating at a future date.