Rosemary and Rue

This must be cool, like the Dresden Files, right? It must be, I swear it is going to be awesome like that.
Spoiler: it really isn't.

October Daye is a private detective and half-fae, she lives with her boyfriend and their young daughter, until she gets caught by the person she was following. She doesn't die, though, but gets turned into a koi fish in a park pond for 14 years, until she turns back. Her family doesn't know about magic, so they think she just left, so they want nothing with her. Then a fae boss lady she knows gets murdered and she needs to solve the crime.

You know, by that description Toby probably sounds tough, right? She sounds like a cool person, someone who can stand her ground and just do her shit. I have bad news, she isn't. Toby Daye is pretty much an idiot who doesn't even seem to have a defined personality. One moment she says she has a hard life and was forced to be super though, the next she makes mistakes that make me think she deserves it all for not learning from anything.
Pert of the story is about her ex-bf, who is basically a scary, evil Peter Pan for the half-breed children. Toby goes on long tangents about how he is totally abusive and their relationship was unhealthy and just wrong. What does she do then? Fucking goes to him and sleeps with him because he was nice for 5 minutes. She is not some victim here, she actively makes her own life miserable through sheer stupidity.
But now that we are talking about the men around October we have to discuss that they were all her lovers or flirt like crazy with her. No, honestly, in this one book she has her baby daddy, her evil ex-bf, her nice ex-bf and then also this cat guy who haaaates her, but he is hot and flirty. Do we really need more “I'm so nothing special” female characters who have a horde of male underwear models fighting for their attention? Do we?

The other thing undefined about Toby is her worth. We are told half-human fae types are considered lowly and crap, basically not really taken in by the fae and not suited for living as humans because of their abilities. On the other hand she is connected to all the freaking people. She has her liege, who is super cool, her ex-bf, the lady who got murdered, she is a knight, she solves supernatural cases, she has other friends and such. Honestly, it doesn't really feel like she is in such a bad position when she has extremely powerful people on her side.
She also looks down on said people. Except for the ones who do her bidding, of course.

It's all written in a weird way as well. So lets just imagine someone who is a mother figure to you gets kidnapped and you can't save her. How would you describe her? I have a feeling that “kind and the most egalitarian person ever” is not the way. Egalitarian is cool, but not the way you describe someone whose loss caused you such sorrow, eh? Or if someone around you gets murdered saying “they breached her privacy and murdered her” sounds stupid. Those two things ain't the same kind of heavy. Again, I don't understand why the author made the specific choices when she was writing the book in first person, this is not how a normal human being thinks.
Then again, she seems to have a lot of faux-poetic, melodramatic thoughts. Now of course this is a first novel, which explains a lot, but where Harry Dresden is kind of charmingly goofy in his own first few, kinda clunky books... Toby is more teenage fanfiction.

I'm not saying this can't be okay later on. Maybe it is, I've seen weirder things before, but this first book is not particularly convincing. I don't like the protagonist, the lore is about fae which aren't my favourite fantasy characters, the prose is not at all brilliant, the supporting characters act like Toby is some heavenly perfect creature.
I will most likely read more of it, though. Maybe I'm just not ready to accept that this series is so uninspired and sucky. I would like to like it, to have another fairly light series of fun action and urban fantasy. So I will give it another chance, maybe a few more. For now I'm not sold. But for that Toby needs to grow a freaking spine and stop being such a plain ass nobody who is treated like solid gold.

Good night and let me take a Daye off!