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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 Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

The Hate U Give is about racism, family, and figuring out how to keep living after the teenage MC sees a friend shot in front of her by a cop. 

The plot flows really well, conveying the several-month wait between the shooting and the eventual verdict with sections spaced out over time but with smaller and smaller page counts. It mean that the immediate events felt very condensed but the focus was always on when something updated for the MC (whether in her persona life or the case). That pacing also worked to show how the two parts of her life were separate by having them actually feel separate for over half the book, then gradually bringing them together with enough time passing for the finale to feel natural. They had time to grow (or to choose not to), and even minor characters felt more complete because of it. 

I love the way that the MC’s relationships with members of her family are handled, particularly with her mom. There are a lot of conversations where it conveys that the other person has different information or life experiences behind their reactions in a way that sets them up as separate people without diminishing the MC’s sense of her own agency. It consistently conveyed that other people around her were doing things and having conversations that may or may not intersect with the main plot and helped them feel like main characters who just happened to not be point-of-view characters. Her relationships with them and her understanding of them as separate people also changes throughout the book, as the often literally life-or-death situations which arise (the shooting itself and the tense events afterwards) push her to see different side of them and to reassess things she already knew. 

Heads-up that there are a lot of references to H*arry P*tter because this was published before JKR’s transphobia became mainstream knowledge. 

CW for drug use (not depicted), domestic abuse, racism, blood, gun violence (graphic), child death (graphic), major character death (graphic).

TW for Harry Potter references (analogies to plot events).

Clear Your Shit Readathon 2020 prompt: Free book

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A Black teenage girl with a red band tying back her hair holds up a white sign with "THE HATE U GIVE" written in black block lettering. "ANGIE THOMAS" is below her feet in red.


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