Skip to main content

Featured

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...

Academ's Fury by Jim Butcher (The Codex Alera, #2)

Academ's Fury is a good follow-up to Furies of Calderon, introducing new players (Varg, Tavi's classmates) & clarifying what's at stake. It's layered and intense, introducing new levels of secrets and intrigue, mixing the political and the personal.

This book has a lot to handle, moving between rural Calderon and the Academy in the capital. In some ways it's a second introduction, basically doubling the number of key characters by adding those around Tavi in the city. This means it has a lot of ground to cover, and it does it admirably, but while the later books will get to use this as a foundation it doesn't have that luxury and ends up dragging in a few spots. 

That being said, the various heist-y escapades are intense and fast-paced. The fights are detailed enough to mean you can follow the action, but not so finicky as to bog down the story. I love every scene with Varg (he's my favorite), and the stakes set up early in the book make all the little things come together very well in the end, plot-wise. I like politics in world-building, and this book brings a lot of that in where it was merely implied in the first book. The layers of relationships are complicated enough to be interesting without being so confusing as to make the characters inscrutable. You don't know everyone's reasoning, but you learn enough for their actions in the moment to make sense. It's a delicate balance, and I think it's working here.

*A continued note from my review of the first book: The way the Marat are set up as “savages” while also borrowing Indigenous signifiers is troubling. The narrative fights back against characters who view them negatively, but also I don’t know how much the author should get credit for “solving” a problematic characterization that he himself created.

**After much reflection, I think that the problematic treatment of fantasy-indigenous people in this series is inextricable from the story and, as much as I personally enjoyed these books as a teenager, I don’t recommend the series.

CW for violence, slavery, sexism, death.


A young man in armor raises a sword to fight disembodied arms in the walls

Comments

Popular Posts