MÉLUSINE and THE VIRTU by Sarah Monette
Ace, Aug. 2005, 432 pgs, ISBN: 0441012868, Hardcover, $24.95
Ace, June 2006, 448 pgs, ISBN: 0441014046, Hardcover, $24.95

Genre: Fantasy

Along with my two previous posts for Chasm City and Transformation this makes the third entrant in my troika of favorite character novels since 2003. All right, I suppose that, technically, it would be a quartet, but I read Mélusine and The Virtu within less than a day of each other, so it feels as though I’m speaking of one solid story.

Prior to writing this, I found myself reading Charles de Lint’s review on A Soul in a Bottle (Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 2007) in which he relates a habit with which I’ve become all too familiar: Buying book after book, adding to my stack of reading material, and, despite all of this, still having trouble finding a book that I really want to read; a book that I won’t want to sigh over and put down after the first five or ten pages. And I do this repeatedly, without ever really thinking about it, until, as de Lint says, “the book shows up.”

Mélusine and The Virtu are easily the books for me. I can think of no other novels that have engulfed my attention so completely that doing anything else, even common day-to-day chores, were either huge impositions or were ignored entirely. And it isn’t only that the books remained fascinating while I was reading them, but also after I had completed them. I’ve never had such a desire to reread a novel (or pair of novels) before, and I suspect that I’ll be unable to resist in the end.

There are many character-based fantasy novels out there. In fact, I would risk saying that the majority of them could be described as such. But Monette’s books seem to fill a gap, even among those other titles, where they become not just character-based but character-centric. The larger portion of the story revolves around relationships. Most specifically, the relationship between Felix Harrowgate and Mildmay the Fox, though of course there are numerous pairings and connections all through the novels, many of which serve to flesh out the personalities and motivations of the two main characters.

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