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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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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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