Notes From a Regicide by Isaac Fellman
this is genuinely one of the most beautiful books i've read in a long time. it has a dreamy quality because of the gorgeous prose, but it also feels heavy and palpable to me, like humid air. it's going to weigh on me. this is partly because Fellman delights in describing things as "wet," bodies and emotions and every possible thing, which i found really endearing and relatable as a writer who also has favorite descriptive words. this is a wet (affectionate) book.
it's many stories in one, and changes a little depending on what angle you look from. in some ways it's science fiction, or science fantasy, a story in a far future that has looped back around to a pre-electricity society with a late-Renaissance feel, about two cities: one that held on to a bit of technology long enough for it to seem like magic and enable a series of dictatorships, and the other an almost unrecognizable New York. it's also the story of a messy and wonderful pair of trans artists as they age, and the trans son they adopted as he memorializes them. it's also the story of those trans artists as young revolutionaries, one on purpose and one mostly by accident, and their history in the city they fled from.
what i love most about this book is how thick it is with details, no matter which of these stories is in the forefront at any given moment. the mundane or colorful details of art, and mental illness, and trans bodies, and family of choice. of lives spent together, in love and in terror and in between those things. i'm getting flowery, not just because i've been reading Fellman's lovely prose for two days, but also because it's hard to explain the way in which this book is about so many things, and so many things happen in it, but also there isn't any central thing that happens i can point to. it's about living! which is so pleasing and heartbreaking and soothing to read.
in short, please please please go read this book, it might be the best i've read so far this year.
how i read it: an e-galley from NetGalley, but i absolutely will be buying this one in hardcover, i need it to be on my shelf immediately.
try this if you: love a novel told through diary entries, dig historical fiction/historical fantasy because this has that vibe, are into slice-of-life starring people who don't know their lives are interesting, are of the age where your parents are turning into old people before your eyes, or just if you have a soul i think
some lines i really liked: i screencapped so many, it was very difficult to choose!!!
I was not related to them by blood. They took me in when I was a terrified child, and smothered me with affection because they could not reach me in any less violent way. I reacted, in turn, like a smothered person.
After two years with my parents, I was starting to feel mature, and even to an extent to be mature. I learned from what they knew and what they didn't know.
I let go, quietly and slowly, of the idea of fixing them. They weren't going to get better—I mean in their anxieties, the tracks they were stuck on. And they could take care of themselves, even if the ways they did it looked like profound dysfunction to me. If I tried to help, they'd go limp or fight me, like cats.
"That's what I'm saying," she said. "But then I wouldn't be free. The thing is that when you're in love, you're not free." Her mouth twisted. "When you came to stay with me before, I knew I wasn't free. And that can be so awful. Being in love, it can be so awful, if you can't tell the person anything."
pub date: April 15, 2025! GO GET IT NOW
