You ever start reading a book and within the first chapter know that you're going to read the sequel? A Marvellous Light hit me like that. It's just fun! Not serious, not life-changing, but fun. I read it over the weekend and I'm going to pick up the sequel this afternoon when the library opens. (Our libraries are closed Sunday and Monday, it is the worst inconvenience.)
This actually--and maybe this is half reading the jaded, unimpressed reviews on Goodreads written by The Youth Who Don't Know How Good They Have It, and only half the book itself--but it actually made me feel a lot of complicated feelings about thirteen-year-old me who read Mercedes Lackey's THE LAST HERALD MAGE and realised that everything I'd been taught about queerness and queer people was incorrect. Like, The Last Herald Mage was utterly life-changing for me, in 1998 or whenever I read it. The only thing that makes this book less life-changing is the timing--and 2024 may be an era full of excellent queer fanfiction that makes the youth think the world should (and will) welcome queerness, but it's also an era full of reactionary violence. Maybe this book is, just as much, earth-shaking. I do still get that feeling of freedom, of limitlessness, from reading it.
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I went to see a talk with Ruoxi Chen last week, also--she's the editor of A Marvellous Light. She talked a lot about serious business writers who also write/have written fanfiction, and I do suspect that Freya Marske is one such. If anyone knows her fandom writing handle, drop me a line, I'm intensely curious to know if I've already read her fic.
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