Plot/Themes- 4.5/5
My main attraction to this series is the theme of brothers and them working together and stuff, so it felt to me that it took a bit too long for them to finally meet. And then when they do meet, Felix is all semi-there and not-himself, so I don't really even know how Mildmay develops any form of relationship to Felix's pseudo-self. He tries so hard to protect him though, it's kind of heartbreaking when Felix doesn't/can't respond.
The world building is quite detailed and creative, though I'm a little dubious of the supposed language consistencies and the good city vs. evil city thing.
Overall, I loved the brothers' story arc and the fantastic world-building, but felt it was a bit ambiguous in relationship semantics.

Characters - 4/5
The vulnerable!Felix is a bit too dependent/fragile, his entire character is based around running away from problems and lying and boatloads of degenerative self-pity, and he just seems a really worthless person being used and letting people use him. Felix' POVs were especially confusing, separating into various stages of coherency and cowardice that don't seem linked to any "personality", that I wonder if you can really call him a single character or multiple-personality disorder (or maybe his character growth was just that radical). Even towards the end, he's a bit of a drama queen, but he's redeemed myself for Mildmay so I don't dislike him as much.
I love Mildmay more than Felix (understatement), and thoroughly enjoyed his half of the narration. He's crude but kind and straightforward, and very snarky in his own head, even to himself. I liked his character arc of going through caring for Felix' issues and questioning himself and his methods. Also the distinct sense that Felix is probably the last person he connects to and his desperation to hold onto that last responsibility ♥
I liked the side characters too (though not most of the Mirador court), von Heber and Bernard were charming, and I liked Gideon's ambiguous motives, but the Sunlings seemed to have very little personality out of plot-device and deux ex machina...
Overall, the characters are all very unique, there are a wide spectrum from flats/dumbs to intelligent to rich to poor who are all given fair exploration as individuals.

Writing - 3/5
The flow is a bit jumpy here and there, especially with MildMay's very very bad grammar narration (I wouldn't have minded if it was just slang, but this is a bit far), and there were many over-used metaphor adjectives. The author also clearly went through the trouble to invent new names for stuff (ex. Months, number counters, occupations), but then reverted to using modern English slang in other areas of the book. There were also inconsistencies in quality, where some parts had wonderful plot points/events, while others were kinda rushed over (esp. when the brothers first meet, that was such a half-assed scene...or maybe she was trying too hard to give the Meet Scene a low-profile approach?)
Overall, it is readable if a bit frustratingly dull in places, or inconsistent. ( )

A rather lurid fantasy, but interesting enough – admittedly, I skip-read it a bit – to buy the sequel in hardcover. Although, four years later, I still haven't read it yet ... ( )

While I appreciated the world-building aspect of Melusine, there were more cons than pros in this novel for me. Mildmay was a very fresh character with a very strong voice and I enjoyed his sections. Felix, on the other hand, had nothing going for him other than his madness, reading over and over about how he saw monsters got a little tiring. I thought the story was very slow to start. It read as if the author was feeling her way around this world before she could start the story. I also wish the novel would have been in third person. Alternating first person views just slows down the story. ( )

[Amy] This is an excerpt from one of my monthly Catalog of Fail entries, in which I detail the books upon which I gave up after my self-mandated 50 pages.

I was almost entirely unable to suffer through an entire 50 pages of this one, and it was with great relief I reached page 50 and was able to stop inflicting the torture on my brain with a clear conscience. Given that others I know have read and apparently liked not only this book but also its sequels, I have to hope the things that bothered me stop soon, because I have a hard time with the thought that people can read such well-described and lovingly-rendered first-person subjugation and rape with apparent enjoyment. Ugh. I felt dirty for days after my attempt at reading this, and feel a bit that way now, just thinking about it enough to write this snippet. And by the way, I was not particularly bothered (at least not in this way) by, say, A Song of Ice and Fire, so it's not like I have a weak stomach for torture and kinky and quasi-consensual sex in my fiction.

If you've read it and think I was wrong to give up so soon, let me know, and I'll try again. I could probably take just a little more of the appalling bits, if that's all there remains to suffer through (I found the bits from the other viewpoint character's storyline interesting enough), but if it's just more of the same for hundreds of pages, I shall consider myself well rid of it.

[ http://weblog.siliconcerebrate.com/ze... ]

General Background
Melusine is Ms Monette's first book in the Melusine series. The book is set in a fantasy world that initially makes me think of something midway between Anne Bishop's Black Jewels set, and Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel series, but it quickly moves from there to find its own setting. It's a very slow moving book, full of rich, intricate detail; and a lot of what happens within it seems to happen in isolation, rather than to further the plot along. It's also, I should mention up front, a reasonably dark book, and the major plotline is kickstarted by a semi-graphic rape scene, so caveat lector...

The Characters
The two lead characters in the story are Felix Harrowgate, who begins the book as a highly respected wizard and member of the Melusine court (or at least its equivalent), but very quickly has his dark, unsavoury past catching up with him. From this vaunted beginning, Felix quickly finds himself sinking - societally, physically and mentally - as events that he's been made a part of but has absolutely no power to control play out around him.

The other character is an assassin-thief by the name of Mildmay (which, in an almost Discworld Omnian naming twist, is actually short for 'Mild May Your Suffering Be at the the Hands of the Wicked') the Fox. Mildmay is Felix's polar opposite: a guttersnipe who's comfortable (for the most part) with what he is. But there's a connection between our two leads that's critical to the story as a whole, and to each of the characters individually.

The Plot
The plot proper begins with a revelation of Felix's true history at a court function, which starts him on a path of self-punishment that puts him into a position where he can be used (figuratively and literally) by the villain of the piece to accomplish an end that threatens all of Melusine, and drives Felix himself mad. From there, the story ambles around in several directions until he and Mildmay meet up with each other about halfway through the book. At this point, the main plot driver becomes getting Felix to someone who can (probably) help him, which is the general thrust of the second half of the book.

Good Stuff
Firstly, Melusine is definitely a richly detailed world, so fans of worldbuilding will have plenty to enjoy in here. I also like the way the two first-person narrative voices (the story swaps and changes between Mildmay's and Felix's POVs) are so solidly different and internally consistent that it's possible to completely skip the section heading that tells you whose POV the next section is from, and know exactly who you're reading by the use of language. In the same vein, I liked the way Ms Monette used tense within Felix's POV scenes to show his mental state - past tense meant he was going through a lucid, coherent state, where present tense (peppered with frequent references to monsters and animal-headed people) was a direct indicator that the madness was controlling him.

I also liked Mildmay's practical, down-to-earth way of looking at the world; and Felix's upper class snark.

Bad Stuff
On the downside, I have to confess that Melusine as a whole just moved too damn slowly and directionlessly for me to be 100% happy with. So much that happened to Mildmay before he met up with Felix (or at least, before he met up with the guy needed him to find Felix) just seems irrelevant to the overall storyline. Maybe it'll be less so come later books, but at this point, there are whole chapters-worth of information in the first half of the book that I find myself wondering why I had to know about except as overall background to the characters.

Likewise, I felt that there was just too much page space dedicated to detailing all the things Felix experienced while he was mad during the first half of the book. By about the fourth or fifth section from his POV where he was describing his perceptions of things that happened around him and which people had which animal heads, I just felt 'enough already - I get that he's mad - I get that he's in a bad place - time to move the plot forward now'. By about the tenth such section, I was skim-reading his passages wholesale. This might not be a problem for a more patient reader, but given the frame of mind in which I read the book (pre- and post- Trailwalker nerves and angsting) it was an issue for me.

And my final niggle was the terminology. It's one of those fantasy novels where you not only need to keep track of all the names of countries and suburbs without a map; you also need to keep track of not one, but two different calendrical systems (which I didn't have too much trouble with - I pretty much much ignored the names of months and moved on) AND a completely different way of reckoning time (everything's built around multiples - but not always bases - of seven, or septads, and Great Septads, which is either 70 or 49 - I'm not sure which; except for weeks, which are blocks of 10-days called decads). It took me 1/3 of the book to work out that the term "septad-day" meant midday as a time (rather than referring to seven days, or a week, as I'd first assumed), and that septad-night therefore meant midnight (although I did pick up quickly that character ages were basically counted in base 7). The time thing was more of an issue for me than the calendrical system was, because it tended to be more critical to understanding time constraints on characters witin a given scene; and to be honest, I found that the extra brainpower it took to keep track of all of that and translate it into terms I understood in my head got annoying fairly quickly - even once I had discovered an explanation of the calendrical systems at Ms Monette's website.

Ratings and Recommendations
Melusine should appeal to fantasy fans who enjoy their books rich with detail; who don't have difficulty keeping track of an entire new lexicon of place, time and date terminology without the help of a glossary anywhere in the book itself; and who don't require a tightly plotted storyline to enjoy what they're reading. That being said, however, I wasn't kidding about the caveat lector in the General Background section... the sexual violence at the beginning is fairly nastily written, so if it's a squick or a trigger for you, then you will be better giving this one a miss.

Personally, I'm going to give it a 7.0/10 - it's not a bad story, although perhaps not one that perfectly suits my reading tastes. I'm not sure yet if I'll continue to Book 2 in the series - I think I'll wait till Orannia has finished reading it and see what she thinks of it... if it gets more tightly plotted and faster moving, then I might give it a go. Otherwise? I suspect I have other books I'll want to get on with far more. ( )