I like Elizabeth Bear. I wanted to like this book. I tried very hard to like this book. When I found myself getting bored, I would give it a break, and then come back to it later, fresh. But in the end I find myself struggling to find anything positive to say about it.

On a basic level the book never really clicked for me. I still don’t understand why the long simmering feud between the faeries and the Prometheans needed to come to a head now. Nor why the leaders of the various factions would set into motion the various plots that played out over the course of the book now. Nor why Arthur and Morgan were in it, nor why cutting Arthur’s hair woke him up, nor why plenty of other things popped up constantly. Part of my difficulty may have been an almost complete ignorance of the subgenre of stories of the world of faerie. I didn’t know when Bear was drawing on tradition, when she was poking tradition in the eye, and when she was breaking new ground. I struggled to understand the history, traditions and rules of world of the fae, and just when I felt like it was starting to make sense some completely new (and frequently earth-shattering) element would pop up, seemingly from out of nowhere. The narrative jumped back and forth from character to character, and storyline to storyline, every few pages. And while a similar style of storytelling had worked fine for me with the Jenny Casey books, here it felt way too choppy. I wished that Bear would pick a character and followed him or her through some arc of a storyline for a chapter.

But my biggest problem with the book was that I never really bonded with any of the characters. There are four main characters in the story, Elaine the Unseelie Seeker who is really mad about what the Faerie Queen did to her son, Carel the chanteuse professor turned Merlin who is courted by both sides, Keith the Dragon Prince/Wolf Prince, and Matthew the Promethean who is really mad about what the faeries did to his brother. There is also a host of colorful supporting characters. As the book went on I found that I didn’t really care for, and found it impossible to root for, any of them, so I really didn’t care which side won, and had little motivation to get to the end of the story (beyond wanting to be able to move on to the next book in my “to be read” stack). And the sex was way too casual, boring, and emotionally detached to play any constructive role in the plot. I guess this is just a world where people have sex all the time for no reason except to amuse themselves. If this is what they spend all their time doing, shouldn't there be a few more little faeries running around getting into things?

So, I put this one behind me and move on to Carnival, Bear’s next book, with hopes that it will be more my cup of tea.