Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman

Book Review

RIYL: Slow-paced character studies, trans narratives, beautiful writing

Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman is the latest in a contemporary movement of literary novels with light science-fiction or fantasy elements marketed as SFF. While it takes place one thousand years in the future and deals with a revolution, it’s not an action-packed thriller or twisty political drama. Instead, it’s a character study of a young trans journalist named Griffon Keming, who is himself chronicling the stories of his adopted trans parents, Etoine and Zaffre, through Etoine’s diary. As the title suggests, we learn early on that Etoine killed the king of his and Zaffre’s original home city, a place called Stephensport that changes names with each new king and is located in what we’d now call Quebec. As the counter-revolution came to crush this one, Etoine and Zaffre flee to New York City to start a new life. But the full extent of their roles in the doomed revolution is spooled out slowly, over the course of the novel.

The real heart and soul of Notes from a Regicide is in Etoine and Zaffre’s relationship, and how these unlikely parents end up informally adopting the young Griffon and helping him to transition and flee from his abusive father. Etoine and Zaffre are a complicated pair. Both are artists and painters, though Etoine is more famous for portraits of the wealthy and powerful while Zaffre prefers to create avant-garde and abstract work anonymously. Etoine is an alcoholic, while Zaffre suffers from schizophrenia, depression, and suicidal thoughts. While both play their part in the revolution, Etoine is mostly apolitical, while Zaffre is a true believer. Fellman is unflinching in showing us the dark and self-destructive sides of his protagonists; though they are undoubtedly better parents than Griffon’s birth father, they never planned on being parents and manage to stumble through a lot of it less than stellar ways. Their romance is not the dramatic, sweeping romance of a traditional romance novel, nor the agonizing slow-burn of a beloved fanfic; instead it feels real and messy and desperate.

The future setting of Notes from a Regicide is only briefly sketched out; it’s a thousand years into the future, and aside from Stephensports legislative branch being a congress of cryo-gentically preserved immortals, the world is mostly unchanged. The wheels of progress and destruction have turned many times, and humanity now lives without computer technology, television, phones, etc., though there exists black market HRT and relatively advanced medicine. We don’t see much of Stephensports or New York City - instead we’re kept relatively isolated in Etoine and Zaffre’s homes. Griffon isn’t out to tell the story of the revolution or provide any context for his world; he’s just here to work through his feelings towards these two people who he loves and who have shaped him so irrevocably.

While the book grapples with questions of art, revolution, parenthood, addiction, and mental health, there’s no theme more prominent than that of its trans characters. Each of the main three characters has their own complicated relationships to their gender and their sexualities, with each coming to their realization and transition at different points in their lives, with different views on medical transition and even different sexualities. Trans relationships can be difficult in some unique ways; what if one or both partners transition to a gender that the other isn’t attracted to? Notes from a Regicide shows one such complication, as Etoine has to learn to see Zaffre as a woman after she confesses her feelings towards him long before she medically or socially transitions. Etoine writes of discovering a new way of having sex, a romantic notion that plays on both every couple’s feelings that they’ve been the first to discover their kind of love, while also grappling with how queer people - especially when first exploring - need to figure out ways of sex and romance that don’t conform to the normal hetero methods.

I admit that it took some time for the book to click with me; like much of this still-unnamed literary SFF movement, it spends most of its time in the thoughts of its protagonists, with writing both beautiful and sometimes rather solipsistic and insular. But through the slow excavation of this central romance, through difficulties both personal and political, I came to really feel for these characters and even cried a little (something that rarely happens for me in books!) It’s one of the more in-depth examinations of trans identity and queer romance that I’ve ever read; if that itself sounds interesting to you, it’s definitely worth a read. However, it’s a hard book to recommend, and most readers will probably bounce off of it. Its light science fiction elements may still turn off more literary-inclined readers, while the same fact that its future feels so similar to our real world may be unsatisfying for SFF fans. Personally, it worked for me, though I do wish Fellman had fleshed out a little more of the background. I think history may repeat in similar cycles, but I don’t imagine a thousand years in the future to be so similar to now.

All in all, this is a wonderful, emotional story of two damaged and flawed people clinging tightly together through turmoil and danger, and of the kid they have to learn how to help.

Rating: **** 1/2

Notes from a Regicide is set to publish on April 15, 2025.

Thanks to NetGalley for the advance copy in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts expressed are my own.