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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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The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin (Inheritance, #1)

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms plays with the shape of power, winding it like a strand of hair on one finger with a slowly widening grin, esui; terrifying and sensual. The stuff of gods, crammed and cramped until they creak and groan as pages turn: Read this.

I loved this book. I tend to be positive about the books I read, but I truly loved this book. The gods have qualities I normally see in depictions of the fae, while also being sufficiently different and complex as to be their own kinds of entities. They are essences, understandable in some ways but inscrutable in some very important ways. Sieh, in particular, is handled very well, his behavior has consistency, but the way in which we are led to interpret it as part of a whole is shaped by Yeine's slowly shifting understanding of life in Sky. The interstitial narration is really good, it makes sense even before you learn (or figure out) why it's happening.

This book is very good and I'm very excited to see what happens in the next one. It ended so well that if it were a stand-alone book I could be content, but I want to spend more time in this world, preferable with these characters.

CW for incest, enslavement, torture, discussion of sexual assault, body horror, gore, death, major character death.

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