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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...
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Gathering Blue by Lois Lowry (The Giver Quartet, #2)

Gathering Blue by Lois Lowry is a dystopian novel about disability and exploitation in a small village. It builds a strange and compelling world around Kira, where syllables in names denote age and maturity, where orphaned children are redistributed, but not loved.

It's difficult to discuss much in this novel without spoilers, but it is a different society in the same world as The Giver, a society which is limited by whatever disaster broke the world into small enclaves and scattered villages with vastly different organizational structures and coping mechanisms. Kira's village is patriarchal, ableist, and harsh. She was born with a deformed foot and was only allowed to live because of her grandfather's status and reputation.

The world is fascinating, every bit of description feels precise and necessary. The only thing I would want changed is to have the book last longer. It feels... unresolved, but that's probably on purpose. It's trying to be hopeful in a very bleak world, but we don't get to see that hope fulfilled in the way I would have liked. Again, that feels purposeful and it doesn't make it a bad story, just probably not one to turn to for a comfort read.

*Edit: It’s unresolved because it’s book two of a quartet. I’ve found some of what I was missing in book three, Messenger.

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