Backpacking Through Bedlam

InCryptid, Book 12

By: Seanan McGuire

Narrated by: Emily Bauer

Length: 12 hrs and 54 mins

Publisher's summary

Seanan McGuire's New York Times best-selling and Hugo Award-nominated urban fantasy InCryptid series continues with the 12th book following the Price family, cryptozoologists who study and protect the creatures living in secret all around us.

Reunion, noun:

1. The state of being united again.

Reconciliation, noun:

1. An act of reconciling, as when former enemies agree to an amiable truce.
2. The process of making consistent or compatible.
3. See also “impossible”.

Alice Price-Healy gave up her life for 50 years to focus completely on the search for her missing husband. The danger of focus like that is that it leaves little room for thinking about what happens after...and now that she’s finally managed to find Thomas, she has no idea what she’s supposed to do next. The fact that he comes with a surrogate daughter who may or may not have some connection to Alice’s recently adopted grandson is just icing on the complicated cake.

So the three of them are heading for the most complicated place in the universe: they’re going home.

But things on Earth have changed while Alice, Thomas, and Sally have been away. The Covenant of St. George, antagonized by Verity’s declaration of war and Sarah’s temporary relocation of an entire college campus, is trying to retake North America from the cryptids and cryptozoologists who’ve been keeping the peace for the past hundred years. And they’re starting in New York.

Alice and company have barely been back for an hour before the Ocean Lady and the Queen of the Routewitches are sending them to New York to help, and they find themselves embroiled in the politics of dragons, kidnappings, and of course, the most dangerous people of all: family.

Getting “back to normal” may be the hardest task Alice has undertaken yet.

©2023 Seanan McGuire (P)2023 Audible, Inc.

Another fantastic read!!!

I have yet to read anything by Seanan McGuire that I have not found totally engrossing and anxiously await each book with anticipation! The series (all of them) are engrossing and magical and lets ones imagination run rampant wishing her books were non-fiction instead!

Nice installment

Nice installment and follow up from the cliff hanger of the previous book. Slowish start but then settled down to a nice listen. Great performance.

Another fantastic InCryptid novel

Seanan McGuire has created another fantastic, engaging story in the InCryptid world. Continuing to follow Grandma Alice and Grandpa Thomas (with their adopted adult daughter, Sally) we find out how they make it back to Earth and what battles are waiting when they land.

I love the world of InCryptid and I'm enjoying watching new developments unfold in it with each new novel.

Alice and Thomas’ return to the real world does not go as planned

It is always fun to immerse myself in the stories of the Price-Healeys, the hidden world of magic and the Incryptids (non-humans) hiding in plain sight. This story is once again told from Grandma Alice’s perspective. Alice is in her 80s but looks barely 20. After spending 50 years traveling between dimensions and ultimately finding her husband Thomas, their homecoming and planned downtime is quickly changed to once again actively fighting the Covenant. Alice’s family believes Incryptids, who are not harmful to humans or other species, should be protected. The Covenant believes that they should be exterminated. After Alice’s granddaughter, Verity, confirmed that their family was alive and well in national tv, the Covenant is once again in America hunting their family along with the Incryptids and the Price-Healeys and their allies are in the way. The story includes what you’d expect from this genre - fighting, dangerous situations, paranormal creatures, evil actors, henchmen, loyal friends and family, tragic back stories, mystical coincidences, snark, and laughs. This book, like all the books in this series, made me laugh, cry, gasp, and grit my teeth. This is book 12 in the Incryptid series and while each book can be read as a standalone, to get the most enjoyment, the books are best read in order. I am happy to learn there will be more books in the series.

Emily Bauer Ponce again did a phenomenal job narrating and breathing life into the story and the characters with enough change of inflection, tone and cadence to voice multiple characters quite convincingly.

Good

I really enjoyed this one. The series keeps on going strong and I look forward to the next.

Chaos Throughout

I loved listening to this fast paced chaotic fever dream. It was fun to get to know yet another member of the Price Family and I am looking forward to jumping right into the next book of the series.

Too much of this should be ending of last book

Is this good? No, it’s sadly just okay. It’s only for enthusiasts of the series. If you read the blurb, then you know what happens for the first half of the book, which is a serious tension killer. I think the first half needed to go into the last book. So go in forewarned that this story needed to be way more substantial in the plot department. The New York section was roughly five chapters of substance. And as always in this series, this book suffers from a lack of falling action.

That said, it’s nice to return to the roots of the series and finally address major plot points created in the first book. We even get some of the plot background that’s been squirreled away in the short stories. Although that highlights the number of hanging threads that still exist.

And as always with Seanan MaGuire there are way too many asides on her personal beliefs. Way way too often we hear about how everyone who thinks is a person. Or how family is everyone who you believe is your family. It’s not that I disagree with these things as much as I’m worn down by the sheer repetitiveness with which they occur. If you cut out all these asides, I think you might take two chapters out of this book. That is never a good place to be in as an author, and highly irritating to any reader who doesn’t just want a sermon on overcoming difference, but wants a fantasy plot. Worst of all it infantilizes the motives of the bad guys. The covenant needs to have some moral ambiguity. Or some reason for their fanaticism. Right now they’re like storm troopers and I don’t care if they live or die. The antagonist exist as strawmen for moral argument.

Final gripe which ties to the original one. Did the second half of the book just repeat the plot of the first novel? Yes it does. Did it simultaneously reduce the big bad covenant of St. George to comically incompetent actors? Yes, yes it did. Why did these issues occur? Again because we left far too little of the book space for the main plot.

tl;dr over half of the book is unrelated to the core plot or is extraneous sermonizing filler. That’s the recipe for a mediocre book by a good author.

The most boring installment yet

This series has been deteriorating in quality the past few books and this one is flat out boring.