I finished
Borderline, by Mishell Baker. It's #1 in a new UF series that has been getting a little Hugo buzz.
Here's a very good observation from GR user
Simon Ellberger's review: "Its title refers to the protagonist, Millicent Roper, being afflicted with Borderline Personality Disorder; to the boundary between our world and the world of the Fey (which in this story has its own mind-boggling effects); and to the line observers draw between viewing others as people or ignoring them as non-persons unworthy of note—this last reference is particularly significant for Millie, who has had her legs amputated and her face scarred, affecting the way others interact (or don’t interact) with her, and even the way she interacts with herself." That observation is spot on, and does lend some good weight to the book.
In terms of plotting, this is fairly typical UF -- MC as misfit detective discovering the world of magic for the first time, present-day Los Angeles that doesn't know about things that go bump in the night. Complete with Scooby gang, mysterious agency overseeing human relations with the supernatural world, and vague stirrings of romantic relationships. What makes this book more interesting is that everyone in the Scooby gang is afflicted with mental illness -- in fact, that's a prerequisite for the job -- and that the MC herself is a double amputee with borderline personality disorder who just the year before jumped off a building in a failed suicide attempt (we are told -- I'm convinced that we'll find out otherwise in a subsequent book. She doesn't remember the incident.).
I enjoyed the book for the most part, though it does not instantly zoom to my favorite-UF list. At many points we get to see the effects of Millie's BPD, but unfortunately we are often hit over the head with it (I got really tired of being told something like "because of my BPD, I did x" -- for heaven's sake, just show us the behavior and let us figure out why she did it!). Similarly her amputee status remains front and center, but somehow I felt that was handled more -- dare I say it -- organically. And in one scene a bad guy gets clobbered with one of her prostheses, so there's that.
Also unfortunately, I had to roll my eyes at one of the central premises of the story -- namely that all human creative geniuses are magically bonded to "echoes", meaning a specific fairy partner who is their muse and best buddy. First, that's just plain dumb -- fairies in these stories masquerade as humans in our society, so this means that to the outside world every single genius would appear to be bonded to a human bff (not necessarily a sexual relationship), no human genius would become truly successful until such bonding occurred, and each genius has to first find their one-and-only-one-fated-fairy-echo (I gag at the fated-mate concept stolen from bad shifter romances). And second, think about it: this means many thousands or millions of fairies walking around taking part in high-profile celebrity society, and supposedly nobody notices? The word doesn't get out? Seriously??
The plot itself is interesting enough, starting low key and gradually developing into A Threat to Human Existence, sort of, as UF so often does. But the writing wasn't compelling enough to really drag me in the way that Dresden or Rivers of London or Cal Leandros books do. So I give it a "yeah, okay, it didn't blow my socks off but it was better than the first Dresden book so there are possibilities" rating for now.
I welcome the opinion of anyone who has read it. Not very encouraging, but the series has had a lot of good reviews too.
