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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...

Rhapsody: Child of Blood by Elizabeth Haydon (Symphony of Ages, #1)

Rhapsody is a slowly burning epic where the stakes are deeply personal, with friendships tense though absolute, the battles scarce but vivid. Frequently dark, refusing to despair. I'm glad to be on the side of time where I don't have to wait for the sequel. 

In high fantasy I'm used to grand stories where the actions of a few protagonists somehow shift the fate of nations... and this book relentlessly bucks that trend. What change they are able to effect is in scale with their efforts, and the disaster whose resolution might have consumed whole books in some other series is instead revealed through tales after it's all over. The journey through the Root in more mesmerizing than monotonous, it has a lot to carry when they make it out and if any less of the narrative had been devoted to that phase of their journey it would have spoiled everything after. 

If you read this book and like it you will be driven to read the sequel, this is is a fairly complete story but it definitely is a "to be continued" situation. The story is grander than this volume, almost so much that it can't quite stand alone in terms of emotional resolution, but the main plot threads are tied off where they need to be.

This book does contain a lot of derisive language about sex workers and sex work, as well as racism in a fantasy setting. It's consistently handled well, and it's clear that the author disagrees with the disparaging views of the characters in question (they are immediately rebuffed almost every time), but that language is present, so please take care of yourselves.

CWs for murder, mass death, child death.

A woman in armor, a Firbold, and a figure in a dark cloak stand in front of a mountain

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