The Winter Long: A discussion post

One of the things I miss about doing fandom on LJ is book discussions, especially going back and discussing books long after they came out. Tumblr moves so fast, and especially for something like a book that everyone finishes at different times it can be hard to go back and see what other people said about it.

In particular, one book that I always wanted to have a good discussion about is The Winter Long by Seanan McGuire, the eighth book in the October Daye series. It's not just a great book, it completely upends almost everything we thought we knew about what was going on in Toby's world, and casts so much of her story in a new light. And I thought the occasion of renay having recently finished the book would be a good time to open the floor.

NOTE: Renay has not yet read the next book in the series (A Red-Rose Chain), so no spoilers for it in comments please. I will be keeping an eye on comments and deleting anything too egregious. (Does DW support spoiler cuts in comments yet? I know LJ does.) Thanks! (Although meaty stuff happens in RRC, too, I think it's perfectly possible to talk about TWL without referencing it.) However, it should probably go without saying that stuff up to and including TWL will be spoiled beyond this point.


So I don't have anything in particular to kick this off with (it's been a long day and my brain is fairly fried, but some potential avenues for discussion (EDIT -- not everything in the list below happens in TWL, because I somehow collapsed that story with the events of Chimes at Midnight when I was typing it up. But they're interesting things to discuss anyway, so I leave it as is.):

( Let me give you a topic. )

And I'm sure there's at least half a dozen other things that I'm just not thinking of off the top of my head. What did I miss? Let's chat. :)