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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...
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The Kingdom of Gods by N. K. Jemisin (Inheritance, #3)

The Kingdom of Gods reckons with the origins and present state of the Arameri as seen through Sieh to make an amazing end to The Inheritance Trilogy. It complicates what we learned before without making earlier knowledge feel cheap, molding rage and sorrow like clay.

This was a deeply satisfying conclusion to The Inheritance Trilogy. There is a sequel novella to this trilogy which I will read after this, but I am content with what's here. It was tense, moving, contemplative, tumultuous, scary, exciting, and finally at peace, without losing zest and intensity along the way. It confronts and dismantles the Arameri's colonialist justifications which filled the first two books. They were challenged earlier, but this book brings things to a head in order to have a chance at a true reckoning for past misdeeds, of humans and gods. 

I loved Sieh as the narrator. I've loved him as a character since book one, and I was not disappointed by his spotlight here. Writing a long-lived godling of childhood in a way that makes him feel like a child when it's fitting doesn't seem easy, yet it was carried off in a way that accomplishes a complex portrait of childhood, not cheapening it by typifying it. 

This book examines and pulls apart old wounds, deep rifts, and sorrows from the dawn of time, giving space for healing and growth without demanding forgiveness from the people who were hurt. It is an artful example of confronting past abuses, both of the importance of doing so and of a few small ways to attempt it. The idea of a cycle of violence fills this trilogy, and this third book especially, but also there's a hope of breaking the cycles, of having something better than rage and pain to look forward to.

It's ultimately joyful without asking for mourning to cease, leaving space for both grief and joy, for people to have complex and contradictory experiences of the same events. 

Read this book, read this trilogy.

CW for incest, massacre, slavery, death, major character death.



A city of towers in the midst of a stormy sea
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