Skip to main content

Featured

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...
Post a Comment
Read more
Labels

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black

Tana lives in a world where walled cities called Coldtowns exist. In them, quarantined monsters and humans mingle in a decadently bloody mix of predator and prey. The only problem is, once you pass through Coldtown's gates, you can never leave.

One morning, after a perfectly ordinary party, Tana wakes up surrounded by corpses. The only other survivors of this massacre are her exasperatingly endearing ex-boyfriend, infected and on the edge, and a mysterious boy burdened with a terrible secret. Shaken and determined, Tana enters a race against the clock to save the three of them the only way she knows how: by going straight to the wicked, opulent heart of Coldtown itself.

TITLE: The Coldest Girl in Coldtown
AUTHOR: Holly Black
PUBLISHER: Blackstone Audiobooks
YEAR: 2013
LENGTH: 419 pages (12 hours 6 minutes)
AGE: Young Adult
GENRE: Fantasy
RECOMMENDED: N/A

Patrial Queer Rep Summary: Gay/Achillean Secondary Character(s), Bi/Pan Secondary Character(s).

DNF 45% in.

The introduction was engaging, and I like this version of vampirism. The worldbuilding around vampires and how the humans react is interesting and works pretty well. The story just moved too slowly to keep me engaged, and I couldn't stay interested in the main character with the decisions she was making. I don't have anything specifically negative to say about the book, it just wasn't working for me. 

CW for blood (graphic), medical content, child death, gun violence (backstory), self harm, parental death, murder, death.

Bookshop Affiliate Buy Link

Add this on TheStoryGraph

A close-up on a pale white hand hanging down, with "The Coldest Girl in Coldtown" drawn on the skin in blank ink


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts