Night and Silence: 3 reasons this may be the best October Daye book yet

The twelfth book in a series doesn’t seem like it should be the best book so far, but Seanan McGuire may have just pulled it off with Night and Silence.

I feel like I admit this every single time I get to review a book by Seanan McGuire, but it’s still true. And as this is a review, it seems fitting to warn you, gentle readers: I come to her books not from a place of objectivity so much as a place of high expectations. I have devoured a significant portion of her oeuvre, and I plan to keep devouring what I haven’t gotten to yet. So, naturally, DAW sending me an advance copy of Night and Silence had me pretty excited.

Night and Silence is at once a deeply personal book for our heroine, October Daye, as well as a book that’s going to have ramifications on the greater world she inhabits. It’s a tricky line to balance, especially coming after The Brightest Fell, which is a bombshell of a book all on its own.

But even though The Brightest Fell left me cranky that I had to wait, Night and Silence has me thinking about everything. Here’s why it’s one of the standout books in the series so far.

A smaller central story

It would have made some sense to have Night and Silence be even bigger than The Brightest Fell. However, by bringing the scale down a bit — and even that’s quite relative, since the main case is October’s daughter going missing — McGuire has the opportunity to let the ramifications of that previous book actually play out. This is a series that’s been crafted to work together, and that means that one book can and will affect the next. It’s most at play in this book out of the 12 released so far.

Though it may not be as beautiful, prose-wise, as The Girl in the Green Silk Gown, it’s still some absolutely lovely writing, which makes the explorations of those consequences pleasurable to read (even if they also cause some emotional pain).

The mysteries left

Not everything is revealed in Night and Silence, though. There are still plenty of things we need to learn about certain revelations made here; there are setups at work even as other plots play out. (McGuire has revealed that the next book has the name of The Unkindest Tide, and once you read Night and Silence, you will have some thoughts about where that could be going.) Perhaps it’s because this is the first time I’ve had to actually complete the full wait for the next book, but something about Night and Silence begs you to keep thinking about it even once you’ve moved on to the next book in your queue.

Emotional resonance

The first sentence in the description of Night and Silence is this: “Things are not okay.”

And things do not become okay until maybe the very last page. (It really depends on how okay is okay for you.) This book is full of people dealing with some traumatic experiences, and yet it’s never too heavy so as to ward a reader away. Instead, McGuire invites you to see what happens to our favorite characters when everything seems like it’s falling apart, exposing new sides to those characters in the process.

This book is ridiculously strong, and if you haven’t tried October Daye yet, getting to Night and Silence should be worth it.