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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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Beneath The Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire (Wayward Children, #3)

Beneath the Sugar Sky attempts to fix something broken before it loses all possibility of ever being right again. There's a sense of urgency defined by absence rather than presence; tension created by what ought to be but is not.

The world-building is fantastic, both for the specific places they visit and for what those places say about the multiverse as a whole. It moves along with the best answers we have for now and then tells the reader new answers as the characters discover them. It made it feel like discovering something wonderful along with people who know enough to be guides while still having a sense of awe at every new thing.

This returns to the setting of the first book to advance what looks like it will be the main narrative of the series, tracing the lives of the children at the school during their tenure (while the even numbered books tell more about people during the time they did not reside there). I knew a little of that structure but I was pleasantly surprised by the variety of settings in this one. The school is a locus but it doesn't constrain the story at all, getting out of the way so that we could have a quest this time. I like seeing different sides of old characters and meeting some brand new ones.

CW for (internalized) fatphobia and references to dieting.

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Purple clouds in a blue sky over a pink soda sea with a slightly open door hovering in the middle

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