Terciel & Elinor by Garth Nix

The first thing to know and remember about Terciel & Elinor is that they both survive this. That's a given as this is a prequel to Sabriel, Terciel and Elinor are Sabriel's parents, and this is set at their first meeting. All that said, the amount of tension Garth Nix manages to bring here is actually impressive. Despite knowing Terciel and Elinor were going to survive, I was still very much engaged and sucked in by the story to the point where the plot armor wasn't a thought in my head. I feel like that's pretty impressive for a prequel.

A note on the cover: I don't feel like Mogget needs to be there... especially as he spends very little time in this book actually in cat form... or called Mogget. I thought that was interesting, actually. The naming thing. I don't think I'd been aware Mogget had gone by anything but Mogget, though it does make sense in retrospect.

I thought Elinor's upbringing was interesting. I kind of knew from reading the "later" books that Ancelstierre had a kind of weird relationship with the Old Kingdom, but I'm not sure it really sunk in until now. I feel it makes complete sense that Elinor's mother would decide to so completely turn her back on the Old Kingdom's customs and such. Feels very in line with the upper class British-y society Elinor's mother would have been born into at this point in Ancelstierre's history. I liked both Ham and Mrs. Watkins. It's pretty easy to see where Elinor got her spunk, even if her Old Kingdom-Charter Mage stuff was suppressed.

Elinor herself was a breath of fresh air. I like that she's optimistic, but also realistic. She works with what she's got, takes what had to be a crazy overwhelming discovery pretty well actually, and actually deals with her trauma. Or I assume she dealt with her trauma. She definitely cried over the deaths of her family and I assume did some sort of therapy while recovering from that mess while still in the hospital. It felt like she dealt with it "off-screen." I liked how she was able to integrate herself into Wyverley College pretty readily. It seems like she got on with the general vibe of the school, which was nice. I feel like Wyverley is a bit more fleshed out here, or at least feels a lot more homey than when Sabriel attends later.

Terciel, conversely, doesn't feel like his personality was super fleshed out. I feel like he got the more casual end of the "I grew up with a militaristic mentor/parent" spectrum. He definitely feels like a more casual person than Tizanael, who definitely has an iron grip on pretty much anything she had to have her hands on. That said, Terciel doesn't feel flat, either, which is good.

I definitely feel like the romance between Terciel and Elinor was just kind of... there. They were both attracted to each other, but didn't have actual time to build a relationship in this book. Honestly, I thought it was a good amount of romance for the story Terciel & Elinor was telling.

My last big note concerns Tizanael's plan in the second half of the book. It really felt batshit crazy to me. They were supposed to just walk into the magic fog, hope Kerrigor was out in the open enough to lasso, and drag him into Death. Uhm... great? Good thing Nix's Big Bads don't tend to hole up in castles with lots of guards around. This section was actually pretty good, I thought, but that plan had me questioning Tizanael's sanity.

I didn't really have many expectations for what Terciel & Elinor was going to be, but I was pleasantly surprised it was as good as it turned out being. I'm not a fan of romance stuff, in general, so the large lack of that in a book that could have been just that was nice. Another good prequel entry in the Old Kingdom/Abhorsen series that definitely enriches what came before/after, depending on your reading order.