In a Broken World, Feverborn Gets the Band Back Together

In the first large arc (through the first five books), Mac, Barrons, and co. didn’t have time to muse on their shattered Dublin, the irrevocable trauma of the walls falling between our world and that of the Fae’s. Iced, what felt like the first novel in what will encompass the next, post-apocalyptic arc, the main character switches from Mackayla Lane to Dani O’Malley, Mac’s friend and sometimes betrayer. The shift generated some consternation among readers (she says in the passive voice), but after seeing what Moning pulls off in Feverborn, it looks like a deft gambit.
In Iced, we see Dublin through Dani’s eyes, and they’re an interesting lens on the end of the world. Dani was severely abused as a child, literally kept in a cage to stop her from using her powers of super speed. The apocalypse freed her, and there’s a strange element of joy in her hyperactive zippings around the ravaged city. How bad it is for everyone but her, this end of the world thing. But a very large part of her is still in that cage, and much of her bluster is delusional avoidance. Her crowing and boasting is that of a hyperactive child. It would be funny (if it weren’t so serious) how wrong her take is on many characters. It’s tragic the way she sees with her heart, and how broken that heart is.

In Burned, Mac is back, but she feels isolated, cut off from Dani, Barrons, and her parents. She prowls around Dublin getting acquainted with the new landscape, the changes in both herself and the people she knew before. She doesn’t see Barrons all that much, and her mom is busy with WeCare (who are going to turn out to be entirely evil, mark my words.) Although she certainly has her battles to fight, there’s a sense of that stillness after the storm, opening the door to self-doubt and recrimination. If only she’d gone after Dani when she ran into the Silvers, if only she’d changed a hundred split-second decisions, if only.
Mac’s sometime antagonist (or foil) in Burned is Jada, a mysterious figure who takes over leadership of the sidhe-seers in the Abbey. Jada is cold and precise, and kind of a pain in everyone’s ass. Who is this new, brutal player with hundreds of girl soldiers at her command? She turns out to be a grown up Dani. After spending five years in the Silvers (magical portals to countless universes), she’s returned, almost the opposite of her youthful self. Most everyone reacts badly to this transformation, more or less demanding Jada dial back her personality to her lost youth, like that’s even possible. She has zero, uh, fecks to give.

Everyone in Feverborn is haunted by something: a former self, a choice not made, the ghosts of loved ones long dead. Mac notes that it’s been exactly a year since she landed in Dublin, searching for her sister Alina’s killer, and that information is jarring: how much everything has changed. Mac begins seeing Alina on the street, in her old apartment, and she cannot know if it’s Alina’s ghost, a fetch created by the Sinsar Dubh designed to drive her mad, or some heretofore unknown, even worse thing. Jada is constantly confronted by her youthful self, and unrealistic expectations of both her and the young Dani. Christian, man, he’s got some serious brooding and regret going on. Even Ryodan, who is pretty much a full time jerk—I would use stronger language if I could—seems more defensive than usual over what he did at the end of the last book.
Feverborn puts together all these isolated players. It’s like Iced and Burned detailed a smashed world filled with shattered people, the glitter on the shards like ice. Mac and Dani-then-Jada circle each other though those novels, figuring out their terrain in the larger whirl of the The Nine, and a Fae-changed Christian, and the sidhe-seers, and everything else. Feverborn puts them back together, and it is absolutely electric. You can feel everyone pulling closer, not toward some idyll of togetherness (which was never true; everyone was at odds), but in a larger sense of purpose and motivation. We have now officially gotten the band back together. Even though, probably, the band will now burn down the club and try to eat the audience, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Oh, and then there’s the cliffhanger ending, one that will make you punch a wall, so you know that everything is right in the Feververse.