Early Review – Backpacking Through Bedlam (Incryptid, Book 12) by Seanan McGuire (5/5 stars)

Reading Level: Adult
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Length: 352 pages
Publisher:‎ DAW
Release Date: March 7, 2023
ASIN: B0B6ZCG4P3
Stand Alone or Series: 12th book in the Incyptid series
Source: eGalley from Netgalley
Rating: 5/5 stars

“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 fifty 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.”

Series Info/Source: This is the 12th book in the Incryptid series. I got a copy of this as an ebook through Netgalley to review.

Thoughts: I ended up really loving this, I am thoroughly enjoying reading these stories from Alice’s POV.

In this book Alice and Thomas are reunited but they have a commitment to find worlds for all of Thomas’s people to live in. After that, they return home and are hoping to try to start a normal life when they get news that the trouble that Verity started with the Covenant has some to a head…war is imminent.

I loved all the craziness and world-hopping at the beginning of the book. The book switches tone about a third of the way in as Alice and Thomas end up in New York dealing with all the craziness that the Covenant is causing there. I enjoyed this part of the book a lot too. There is a lot of action and it was fun to watch Sally (Alice and Thomas’s adopted daughter of sorts) interact with all these types of cryptids for the first time.

I did feel like the battle was a bit anti-climatic at the end. I assume this is just the start of the war with the Covenant but the end of the book kind of feels like the Covenant was maybe driven off for good, I was a bit confused about where everything was going by the end.

I also struggled a bit with the novella because I kept getting family members mixed up. The novella that is included deals with Sally’s old friend (James I think?) and alternates between his POV and that of the Aeslin mice that have decided to worship him. It was a cute novella and does give some insight into how the Aeslin mice live, but I didn’t enjoy it as much as the full length story.

My Summary (5/5): Overall I really loved this. McGuire’s Incryptid series is one of my favorite series that she writes. I have really been enjoying Alice’s POV and all the crazy worlds and species we get to meet. I hope we get another book from Alice’s POV in the future. I would like to shift from this type of parallel world hopping to more focus back on the cryptids in the future, but we will see where things go.