Valdemar: Family of Spies by Mercedes Lackey

 Valdemar saga (in chronological order of the world, not order of publication):

The Mage Wars
The Last Herald-Mage
Collegium Chronicles

The Herald Spy

We are back in Valdemar! I took a break after The Herald Spy series because I am over Perfect Mags and his wife, Perfect Amily, but time has moved forward, they have three children, and the oldest, Perry, is a young teen who has the gift of Mindspeech with Animals. 

There have been reports from the borderlands that people from Valdemar have gone missing and Mags decides its time to take his young son with him to investigate? WTF, Mags? Dangerous things are happening here. Anyway, Perry bonds with a dog-like creature with human-level intelligence named Larral. Eventually Perry and Larral separate from Mags and they end up trapped in a city run by a crazypants cannibal and Perry runs the dog kennel. My summary makes this sound boring. It wasn't boring at all. Perry is so much more interesting of a character than Mags. I'm so happy to be spending time with him and Larral.  4/5 stars

Lines of note:

It would be nice to be a cat, he thought. Everything is simple for them. Food or not-food. Thing to play with or thing to ignore. Favored human or not-favored human. (page 52)

Preach it. In my next life, I want to come back as a pampered housecat.

:I cannot smell any spirits,: Larral objected.

:...Wait. You can smell spirits?:

:Of course I can. So can dogs and wolves and foxes. Cats see them.: (page 191)

I feel like Lackey must have been living with the platonic ideal of a cat when she wrote this book. If you are a cat owner, you know how cats just randomly stare at spots on the wall/ceiling. What are they even looking at? Obviously it's spirits. 

Thing I looked up:

hackamore - a type of animal headgear that doesn't have a bit

Hat mentions (why hats?):

None

Up next in the Family of Spies is the middle child, a daughter named Abi. Her book is Eye Spy. I mean, it's actually Abidela, but that's a dumb name, right? Anyway, at the beginning of the book, Abi doesn't seem to have any magic like everyone else. She's seemingly cool with this because no one in these book series ever has feelings of jealousy or anxiety. In general, I like Valdemar, but Lackey's perfectly rational and perfectly behaving teenage characters annoy me to no end. 

ANYWAY.

Abi and Princess Kat are running an errand for the queen and Abi senses that a bridge they are about to cross is going to collapse and she and Kat manage to get everyone off the bridge to save their lives. That's how we learn that Abi has a Gift for sensing structural weakness?  I dunno. In my head I called it Architecture Magic.  

(Also, yo. A bridge collapse on page four? Ugh. I was in Minneapolis when the I-35W bridge collapsed and I was sweating reading about a fictional bridge collapse. Maybe I should deal with my trauma from an event from more than fifteen years ago.)

Just like her brother Perry in The Hills Have Spies, Abi is soon sent out to the borderlands to help folks with infrastructure projects. Of course there are bad guys and Abi has to deal with them. Also, Abi is asexual? Maybe? 

I dunno. Abi's kind of boring and as much as I love to talk about crumbling infrastructure, there was a lot of talk about bridges, dams, and roads failing and this girl here does not need that in her life. 3.5/5 stars

Line of note:

...she reckoned that for every one happy marriage there were a dozen that ranged from "distantly friendly" to "armed truce." (page 2)

What a terrible thing to think about the institution of marriage. But now that I think about it, maybe it's true. 

Hat mentions (why hats?):

"So you didn't know that Bardic Trainees have leave to set up with a hat and play at the Fair?"

"Set up . . . with a hat?" the girl replied, bewildered. 

So Abi explained how all the Bardic Trainees had permission to come down to the Fair during the day that they were given off from class, and after classes were finished for the day, set themselves up with a collection basket - or hat - and play for whatever money people would throw into it. (page 89) 

"...Most people don't bother with a hat..." (page 90)

By the nice layer of coppers in the straw hat she had put out, Lee had found a very receptive audience. (page 97)

Up next is Spy, Spy Again where Mags and Amily's youngest child, Tory, must go save a kidnapped distant cousin. Tory has the gift of Farsight, but only when he's in conjunction with the King's middle child, Kee. Together the two of them head off to save the distant cousin. 

Do you mean to tell me that in each of these three books Mags and Amily end up sending their children off to foreign countries? Yes, yes, they do. Do you mean to tell me that in each of these books their children learn about magical powers they possess that they didn't know they possessed? Yes, yes, they do. 

What I'm saying is that this trilogy got repetitive, yo. BUT! Guess what? They introduced some cool magical creatures in this book and I was down with that. Eh. I'm glad that we're moving away from Mags and his family in the next Valdemar trilogy. 

Once again I'll note that Lackey's teenage boy is remarkably emotional aware in this book. When his best friend, who he relies on to do magic, suddenly gets his own magic and falls in love and can never return to their shared native country, Tory is aware of his own jealousy and anger, but does absolutely nothing about it because he's so rational in his interrogation of his feelings. I just want someone in this saga to make a dumb mistake at some point. I would not have handled this very well when I was a teenager.  3.5/5 stars

Line of note:

"Love. That's fine for fancy songs and theater and the nobly born, but people like us need to be practical." 

...

"I'd marry an older woman," Derdan said. "Long as she's brisk enough to work the shop and the house and brings some money of her own to the arrangement. She's bound to be grateful, see, especially if she's an old maid, and if she's too old for children, like Birk said, I can always adopt a couple useful foundlings to take my name and work the shop just like blood-born. I'd marry an ugly woman, too, if she's nice-tempered, smart, and good to be around a good cook," he continued stoutly. "Same reason. Bound to be grateful, and no worry about her canoodling either. Man eats a lot more than he beds a woman. And it ain't a face I'm thinking about in bed, anyway..." (page 211)

Boy, if this is the the tone of young adult literature in modern times, no wonder kids these days aren't getting married.

What I looked up:

apport (page 114 for the first of many, many times) - Our distant cousin apports a lot of food in this book and I learned it means "paranormal transference of an article from one place to another." 

Hat mentions: 

As for "free" entertainment that relied on coins dropped in a hat. . . there was none of that. (page 56)

"Don't think to have it stitched together so you can take it on and off like a hat." (page 163)

...Tory found that the headwrap kept his head a lot cooler than even a hat. (page 214)

Have any of you ever found a hat cooling? I've only found them to be sweltering, particularly in the summer. I have a wide-brimmed straw hat to wear during the summer and my hair is always plastered with sweat when I take it off. It's more for keeping the sun off than cooling. I did not understand this sentence. 

*******************

Overall, I haven't enjoyed the Mags books as much as I did the first couple of trilogies of this world, but I do like being in Valdemar.