★★★☆☆ Butterfly Effects, by Seanan McGuire
A new direction for the Incryptid series
Butterfly Effects
Seanan McGuire
A new direction for the Incryptid series
Butterfly Effects is the fifteenth full novel in Seanan McGuire‘s Incryptid series. The Incryptid series tells the story of the Price family in North America. The Prices make habits and maybe careers of succoring cryptids, which in this world are very real, and include many intelligent and often human-like species like dragons and were-bears. Just for fun, there are also ghosts and various types of magic-users. The Price family spend a lot of their time combatting the Covenant of Saint George, a kind of anti-cryptid Ku Klux Klan.
The Price family is large and keeps growing, since they have an endearing tendency to pick up strays. Each novel (until now) has focused on one particular Price Family member. Thus the point-of-view character in the first two novels was Verity Price, one of what was, at that time, the youngest generation of Prices. That was followed by two novels about her brother Alex then another Verity novel, then three about their sister Antimony, and then two about their cousin Sarah, etc. As a general rule each of the chosen gets to be the POV character of two or three novels, then the focus moves on. (In addition, there is an astonishingly large number of short stories and bonus novellas about the Price family and their friends. Many but not all are listed on the Goodreads Incryptid page. )
The plot, as often as not, is a battle of some sort between the Price family and the Covenant. The Covenant is the typical incompetent villain of many a long series. They lose and lose and lose, but they always seem to rise to annoy readers yet again. I would be happy to see them vanish entirely from the stage.
Butterfly Effects breaks precedent in two (to me) welcome ways. First, we have two point-of-view characters, Sarah and Antimony, even though both of them have had their chance in the barrel already. Second we have an entirely new plot, which has nothing to do with the Covenant.
Sarah is the focus of this novel. Antimony is mostly supporting cast. Sarah is an adopted member of the Price family and is herself a cryptid, a member of a telepathic parasitic species called “cuckoos.” (Apparently the idea came from The Midwich Cuckoos, a novel that I will get around to reading one of these days.) As a consequence of events in novels 9 and 10, Sarah became an immensely powerful telepath and mathematician, a Queen of her species. She broke a lot people and things in the process, and the consequences catch up to her in Butterfly Effects. Turns out her home planet is not happy with her antics and drags her back to stand trial.
Overall, I liked the new directions in Butterfly Effects. It was a good plot. The story-telling, though, is surprisingly clunky. McGuire is a prolific and successful author who knows how to get the mechanics of story-telling right. But you would not guess that from Butterfly Effects. Her most recent novels have been damaged by overexplaining, and this one is no exception. I will continue to read the series, but I found this one a bit disappointing.
Thanks to Tor and NetGalley for an advance Reader Copy. Release date 10-Mar-2026.
We Sing It, Anyway
As usual, the novel is followed by a bonus novella, We Sing It, Anyway. It is told by Elsie-Price-Harrington, another young Price. Elsie mother Jane and her brother Artie were killed or destroyed in previous novels, and Elsie and her father are grieving hard. I can’t say much more about this novella without spoiling, since it’s about Elsie dealing with the consequences of Butterfly Effects. [spoiler1]
In previous novels Artie was tragically and inadvertently mind-wiped by Sarah. Sarah reconstructed an inadequate and unstable facsimile, Arthur, from memories of Artie. That personality has been falling apart. In Butterfly Effects it transpires that enough of Artie survived in Arthur to allow his reconstruction. Thus Elsinore gets her brother back and her father gets his son back. It’s a joyful story.