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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...

Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi

Rooted in foundational loss and the hope that can live in anger, Riot Baby is both a global dystopian narrative an intimate family story with quietly devastating things to say about love, fury, and the black American experience.

Ella and Kev are brother and sister, both gifted with extraordinary power. Their childhoods are defined and destroyed by structural racism and brutality. Their futures might alter the world. When Kev is incarcerated for the crime of being a young black man in America, Ella—through visits both mundane and supernatural—tries to show him the way to a revolution that could burn it all down.

TITLE: Riot Baby
AUTHOR: Tochi Onyebuchi
PUBLISHER: Tor.com
YEAR: 2020
LENGTH: 176 pages
AGE: Adult
GENRE: Fantasy, Science Fiction
RECOMMENDED: N/A

Partial Queer Rep Summary: No canon queer rep.

DNF 53%.

*I received a review copy as part of the 2021 Hugo voters packet. 

It’s told in chunks, creating at feeling of jagged edges and snippets of a story. I liked it at first and then got to the back-to-back descriptions of birth and a stillbirth/miscarriage, which is a hard no for me. Even if the rest of the book is fine I need to stop.

CW for cursing, racism, stillbirth (graphic), pregnancy/birth (graphic), blood (graphic), incarceration, panic attacks, seizures, medical content (graphic), medical trauma (graphic), gun violence, violence, police brutality, animal death, child death, death.

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A Black person's face, with the image composited like it's made from many faces.


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