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Two Essays on The Count of Monte Cristo

I love The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. I have read the unabridged version more than once, and my most recent reread was in 2023. At that time, I wrote a couple of brief essays which I posted on Tumblr, one of which was about a canonically queer character and the other discussed a character who is often left out of the various adaptations. I present for you these essays with expansion and alteration, because I keep returning to them as pieces of writing and because I don't want them to be limited to those original posts. I'd like to thank longtime Patron Case Aiken, who receives a monthly shoutout, as well as new patrons DivineJasper and Sasha Khan. (Quotes are from Robin Buss’ English translation of Alexandre Dumas’ work.) Link to Audio Version. ----- Canonical Queerness in The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas You’d need to change surprisingly little of The Count of Monte Cristo to confirm Eugénie Danglars as a trans man (or a masc-leaning nonbinary person...

Animorphs Book 19: The Departure by K. A. Applegate

The Departure is my favorite book in the main series. It pulls together tensions that have been building since the start, and bends the book structure to achieve something magnificent, poignant, and challenging in an amazing way.

I've been looking forward to reading this again since I started this re-read/review thing. There are a couple of later books that come close to being my favorite (and I reserve the right for one of them to topple this one), but I've really gotten to appreciate how much groundwork in the previous books comes together to make this story feel inevitable, necessary, and brilliant.

A girl (Cassie) turns into a butterfly (swallowtail)

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