2025-12-24 (last edited 2026-02-26)
Doing my best to give first impressions for media I engage with. These are fairly unrefined. There will be no unwarned major spoilers here, but there might be minor ones that I judge won’t change the experience of the media.
London Jewish dyke Rainbow Rosenbloom gets posessed by a dybbuk fulfilling a centuries-old curse on her bloodline. Demons, in this world, are part of an extraplanar capitalist hell; Kokos, our dybbuk, works for Mephistco, in a department specializing in curses. The book is a comedy about being a dyke and a Jew and also about 90s corporate hell. It’s told in first person by Kokos. Featuring: a dyke, a dybbuk, an angry lesbian, and an emotionally mature straight woman. I really enjoyed the silliness of it. The ending made it: the book committed to both silliness and respecting its characters. Warning for some casual biphobia throughout.
Recommended for: queers, Jews, and friends.
I had a lot of thoughts a month ago when I read this and didn’t write them down. In brief: the premise and mood is interesting, but the book didn’t deliver. Haunted girls and outcast queers in a gothic horror in the Inland Empire is a great setting, but it didn’t do what I think gothic horror ought to. It had far too many points of view to tell deep stories about most of them, having various chapters devoted to the point of view of minor characters. One of three main PoV characters is a cop, and I don’t think his eyes add anything to the story. He sucks. He thinks he doesn’t. Everyone else knows he does, and his actions demonstrate that he’s a violent piece of shit. His point of view felt gratuitous. The action sequences at the end I found overly cinematic; they broke the mood. I’m also not a fan of how the villain is just a guy but is meant to represent cycles of colonial violence.
Recommended for: honestly not sure.
Note: I had the flu when writing this and I’m not editing it. Apologies for incoherencies.
October Daye is an Urban Fantasy mainstay. It fits a particular niche: the main character is a woman who isn’t defined by men, most of the supporting characters are women, and it’s about found family. It’s very “schlock,” a bit episodic, and steeped in urban fantasy tropes. That includes a central straight romance, which isn’t my thing, and I’m not a huge fan of how brooding the love interest is, but whatever.
I read the first 17 books sometime last year in a big binge. It’s definitely the most urban fantasy I’ve read. It’s fun. The writing is alright. The world is based on fairy tales, so it’s kind of horrifying. THat makes for fun characters too, like the sea witch (I’m a sucker for cool grandma who is always the most powerful person in the room).
But coming back after some months has really put into focus how fucked up this series is. Silver and Lead is pretty typical for October Daye; it’s a lot like every other one of these, so I’m going to talk about the world of October Daye.
October Daye takes place in the modern world except there are fae and changelings alongside humans. Humans don’t know about Faerie. Changelings—people with both fae and human ancestors—are an underclass in Faerie. Fae have magic; changelings have less magic. Toby Daye, our main character, is a changeling, and much of the series is about her navgiating Faerie.
Faerie is an awful place. The magic of a fae or changeling depends on what fae “races” they are, measured by blood, by descent from a Firstborn (a blood child of Oberon, Titania, and Maeve, who are esentially gods). This is introduced slowly over the course of the first few books, making it feel normal. It’s also a really fucked up premise: scientific racism that is true. The books do not explore how fucked up this is.
Also, Faerie is run by the feudal system. These books have queens and lords and dukes galore. This feudal system doesn’t recognize the personhood of changelings, an endless source of plot. Toby does not like the feudal system, but participates in it. She is a knight in service to a lord. She’s unconventional, and often looked down on as a changeling, but she is part of the system of Faerie. She is no rebel.
Thematically, October Daye is centered around reckoning with abusive family dynamics and making a found family. This is especially brought out by Faerie not understanding consent. Magic applied to another is a violation. There is plenty of that, and physical violence too, a world built on etiquette and violation. The sea witch is the epitome of this: she is bound by an ancient curse which compels much of her behavior, turning her into the monster under the bed but also a dick. Yet she is kind, and many of the characters forge genuine familial relationships with her. The found family is fucked up, but it’s better than the blood family.
My biggest critique of October Daye is that it does not take on any of the structures that caused the abuse in the first place. McGuire is not sparing. She understands that abusive family members are often well-intentioned, and that familial relationships are too complex to be reduced to “they’re abusive.” (I am using the word abuse as an umbrella term here, because I think it fits, not because the text relies on it). The October Daye books are aware that the structure of Faerie is behind much of the abuse and trauma its denizens face. But neither Toby, nor any of the other characters, make serious attempts to change this structure, nor really believe that it’s possible to change it. There are neither revolutionaries nor reformers. There are only “bad” nobles and “good” nobles.
In our world, liberation is possible. But it is unclear if it is in Faerie. How much is determined by blood? By Oberon? Are the woes of Faerie caused only by ancient curses and the families of gods or by natural law also? I fear that McGuire is writing the latter. And that makes me deeply uncomfortable, because of the many anti-liberatory political projects in our world that are predicated on convicing people that opppression is scientific or natural reality.
Recommended for: people who read the first 18 books.
A book about trans lives. The main characters are a pair of t4t painters and their son, who is writing about their lives. One of the painters was a revolutionary, but this book isn’t about revolution, or the titular regicide, or politics, really. It’s about these three people. The book is ostensibly set in the far future, but this is set dressing; it’s really literary fiction about today. There’s something in the timefulness of it that reminds me of Tamsyn Muir’s The Locked Tomb; interestingly, they have the same editor.
Notes from a Regicide feels like a story trans people tell each other. I don’t know how a cis person would understand the book. I can’t point to what it is, but there’s something to Etoine and Zaffre (the painters) that feels inescapably real, their story resonating off the queers in my life even as the conditions of their lives are so different. I’m not sure if anything else I’ve read has had this effect.
I’m not sure what to make of the book. I should read more trans fiction.
Recommended for: the queers.
A critique of representation and a satire of literary culture and publishing in the United States. What I most appreciated about it is that every time I started developing a political critique of something in the movie, it later turned out that this was intentional, and someone would make a similar critique of the main character. He’s an interesting fellow. I similarly appreciate the ambiguity of the ending. The film doesn’t present solutions.
The movie is bitterly self aware and it presents this awareness to its watchers. It mocks Black fiction pandering to suburban white people. There’s something darkly, perversely amusing about being white and watching this movie in the suburbs, on recommendation from my mother, who herself was recommended it by her (white) friends.
Recommended for: fans of satire.
It’s really good, as expected. Very funny and well put-together. The “main character” boxer-turned-priest Jud Duplenticy is a goldmine in the setting of a conservative church. The Knives Out movies do a great job of adapting the detective story to the modern day, and Benoit Blanc is as wonderful to watch as always. I appreciate the theme of showing grace to people even when they don’t deserve it.
Still, I think this movie might actually be my least favorite of the three Knives Out movies. I would have to rewatch Glass Onion to be sure (the first movie is definitely my favorite). The whodunnit in Wake Up Dead Man fell flat for me and lacked depth, and unlike Glass Onion, this wasn’t the point. There are also cinematographic choices that took me out of the film, mostly in the first act: the internet video type stills of Lee’s books and Cy’s YouTube, the church destruction montage, and parts of Wicks’s sermons. Also Chimney Rock is not a believable New York town.
Recommended for: fans of detective fiction.