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October Daye / Inheritance - Essay Series Part Five: Long Series and How to Read Them

Hello Patrons and general audience members! Welcome to another Books That Burn essay by Robin. Thank you to Case Aiken, who receives a monthly Patron shoutout. [Full Audio Available Here] This is the fifth and final entry in a five-part essay series discussing two long-running book series by queer authors: October Daye by Seanan McGuire, and Inheritance by A.K. Faulkner. I chose these series because I love them both, they were intended from the start to be long series, neither of them are finished yet, and the authors have different structural approaches to developing each series across so many volumes. Purely coincidentally, they are both long-running contemporary fantasy series mainly set in California in or near the 2010's, with major characters named Quentin, and whose fast-healing protagonists have a tendency to quasi-adopt a gaggle of magical teenagers. After a brief moment in the 1990's, October Daye begins in earnest in 2009 and has reached 2015 as of the eighteenth boo...

Megamorphs 3: Elfangor's Secret by K. A. Applegate

The Drode offers the Animorphs a chance to stop a Yeerk from changing history beyond recognition. They follow him through time, tracing hundreds of years of slaughter, sorrow, and gore. The tone swings between absurdity and horror.

All of the Animorphs react differently to the mission and to the cost proposed by the Drode. We see a stark example of how Cassie and Marco anticipate Jake's thinking, but in different ways. Because it switches frequently between perspectives we get the chance to see different reactions to nearly the same event. I appreciate how each of them has different ways of processing similar information, and also how they each pick up on different things around them. This book does a lot to develop Cassie, Marco, and Ax, in particular, as they tend to be more difficult to read in books which they do not narrate. Cassie is still dealing with events in The Departure, clearly not feeling absolved by her later actions in The Sickness. "Cassie, the killer with a conscience. Kill 'em, then cry over 'em."

The Animorphs (Jake, Marco, Rachel, Tobias, Cassie, and Aximili) stand together

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