While it’s billed as a sci-fi book, this definitely read more like a literary fiction story with very light SFF elements. I still found it really enjoyable despite that.
This story’s heart and soul lies in the different characters' stories and experiences as trans people living in this alternate world. The main characters Etoine, Saffre, and Griffon are so real and raw. Their stories of their transitions feel so personal and were more interesting than the plot of the book outside of their personal battles.

I have been trying to think about how to review this book since I finished it several days ago, but the themes are so expansive and universal, yet somehow very personal that I don't have a successful pitch. It's speculative fiction with a bit of a post-apocalyptic cli-fi feel in the background... but it's primarily a story about love, gender, art, immigration, and political sedition in an imagined country in a future not hard to believe.

I really liked it, in large part because I found all of the characters fascinating. There's some plot, but it largely exists on the periphery of the character work. Griffon is the primary narrator, telling his father's story and his mother's story through his father's prison diaries and storytelling. It's slice of [a very difficult] life, reflections on finding and creating family, and ruminations on art.

I selected this book on a whim, and found it to be really satisfying in a way I can't quite describe.

This is a book about deeply flawed people. It is heavy, at times very dark, and deals with subjects many people may choose to avoid. The writing felt disjointed at times, and more than a bit meandering. With all that said... I think this book is really powerful, and even important.

If you are not someone who needs to be careful with triggers and certain subjects... I recommend going in blind and just really taking it all in.
While it is considered science fiction, I really felt like the sci-fi and world took a backseat to character development and exploration. It feels more literary fiction than anything else.

This is a book I'm still processing, and will be for a long time.

Thank you to Isaac Fellman, Tor Books, and Netgalley for my advanced copy.

You know how sometimes you put a book down on finishing it and the world looks different, like the flavour of the prose has bled up into your thoughts, your perception, so for a little while you've been translated into its grammar? That is generally my experience of reading the work of Isaac Fellman, and Notes from a Regicide, his newest novel, is no different. But when I try to encapsulate the substance of the story into a blurb, to cup something tangible about it in my hands so I can offer it up to you to share, it slips between my fingers, leaving only fragments. Despite being a book utterly grounded in the flesh and the tangible world, it is itself surprisingly evanescent.

There are two stories, interleaved. The first, of Griffon, who escaped a violent father to live with Etoine and Zaffre, in whose house he felt safe enough to be a boy, finding in them new parents. The second, the story Griffon constructs from Etoine's notes years later, of his and Zaffre's life in distant Stephensport before and during their revolution. Which is ultimately the crux of it, but gives away nothing about why this is either speculative, or so wonderful.

I'll start with the speculative elements first, because they are the easiest to grasp (while being insubstantial). Most of the content and action of the novel is focussed in on relationships and the interactions between characters and each other, or their own self and story. No one in the foreground does anything inherently SFFnal. But as the story progresses, it becomes more and more obvious that all these fairly realist events are taking place in the distant future, in a city that does not currently exist (or if it does, not in any way a recognisable form from Stephensport in the story). We learn more about it, about the buried electors who, revived at intervals, select the city's new leader and namesake. About the gulf of centuries that exist between the story-time and now. About the subtle and less subtle differences between Griffon, Etoine and Zaffre's world and ours. Most of these come in glimpses and references, incongruous moments of a thing where it's not supposed to be. But together they built, quietly, into a picture of a future I am fascinated by and prevented from fully grasping. And its absence is part of its success - the world is the world, for the characters in the story. It is real and normal and graspable, even if Stephensport is a mystery to those outside its boundaries. And so, for those living in a place, the place is not remarkable in its mundane details. Thus, not remarked upon in their notes or diaries. Stephensport is most clearly shown by Griffon, who has never been there, but yearns to understand this understated thing in Etoine's words.

That mystery is never fully resolved. It is not a rich world to be tour-guided around, more a backdrop. But for something that never comes into focus, there are some extremely interesting choices in its construction, especially socially and structurally, nonetheless.

Why it's wonderful is a rather harder matter.

If you like realist writing, or litfic - which I do - there is much to be said for the sort of immersion in a character and a moment of being that Fellman excels at. Griffon and Etoine both write with an obvious, idiosyncratic voice, and become more and more real as their writing continues through the book. But Fellman has a particular knack for catching them in their most human moments, especially Griffon - when he's stuck in a thought or a doubt. There's all the irrationality of the deep interior thoughts that never seep out into the world, the odd comparison, the habits, the weird connections.

But where this really comes to the fore is in the way those fully realised characters interact. Because there are these two interleaved narratives, and we get the narration and interiority of both Etoine and Griffon, we can triangulate around the points of their relationship with each other and Zaffre, and gain a depth of it that could never come from seeing each alone. Etoine in his own words has a different shape when we first meet him through the awestruck gaze of a teenage Griffon. And as the story goes on, the thing we are told at the start - that Griffon loves his found parents - comes closer and closer to the surface, becoming almost painful in its brilliance.

I do not think I have ever read anything that captured the idiosyncracy, the mundanity and the marvel, of love like Notes from a Regicide does. It is a love story, of a child to parents, of a man to his wife, and of a whole family, each for each other and themselves. It captures a love that includes the flaws, the boredom and the habit, the mysteries. And these all make it feel deeper and more richly true by the end.

From the beginning, we know this is a story of grief, written by Griffon after Etoine's death. But the depth of that tragedy only becomes real once we have come round full circle to it again at the end, having experienced life through their own eyes.

That alone would be wonderful enough, but there's far more at play here. I could talk about the way Fellman portrays the revolution, backgrounded and looked at sidelong, until it cannot be ignored, all while Griffon is desperate to know more about it. I could talk about the way both Etoine and Zaffre look at and talk about art. Both could take up whole essays of their own. But the thing I found myself lingering over most, as I was reading, was simply the beauty of Fellman's descriptions, and so it is this I shall focus on instead, having filled five pages of notes with quotes of them.

For example:

"I went through his desk when he died and found all of these writings (Zaffre left none behind, or vanishingly few). They are the ingredients for the book I am writing now. He would find that metaphor too homely, but I, unlike my parents, am a cook. They look like ingredients too: notebooks thick with interleaved drawings, wrapped in shiny brown leather like chicken skin; small parcels of old paper tied with string like roasts ready for the oven."

or:

"But by the time I met him, he really was cold. The kind of cold that preserves things, like the way you keep your beer in a sealed bottle in the snow or the stream when camping."

I realised, as the story went on, that the descriptions served a purpose beyond themselves - Fellman leaves them long, sprawling, unnecessary, in a way that forces you to slow down. They're a tool to force you to acknowledge certain aspects of the world, often the mundane details that build up a person.

And then of course, it becomes obvious that Fellman is doing this all over the place. The word that most vividly comes to mind when I want to talk about this book is "lingering" - the prose does it everywhere, highlighting and pacing you as you go, like so:

"Words have colors and colors have words. At times, when a word has been on my mind too long, they take on shapes and actions. Regicide is a blazing bar of iron whose brassy heat I grip firmly between the teeth, as an obedient dog does a bone. I can't say why, or why I can so clearly imagine the sear of that bar in my mouth, its brief taste of blood - but I do."

And a picture builds up, in all that lingering, of what matters in this world, and to these people.

It's not always beautiful, mind. Some of Fellman's best or most memorable turns of phrase are to the grosser parts of being human.

"I was a mass of strong smells tied together in a crude packet of skin."

Some of them feel universal, the sort of thing everyone can relate to, but many are deeply idiosyncratic, tied up in the very specific experiences these characters have, especially with their bodies and change in their bodies. All three of the family are trans, and all three experience and discover it, navigate it, in their own ways, but all wear it in their physicality, and have it read by the other two. Skin and hair, clothing, binders, the way of walking, posture and voices, all are handed out in these lingering moments to the reader, to try to see this family the way each see the others, full of love and the close attention we only give to those closest to us.

One of the things most clearly encapsulated by all of this is the scars they all three live with. Some of this is physical - Etoine walks with a cane and has significant damage to his feet. But much of this is psychological, the ghosts of the lives they've lived and the places and people who have shaped them. Stephensport is most visible in the story not as a place described, but a scar on the person of Etoine and Zaffre, whose experience of the revolution there can never be escaped, only endured.

And that's the crux of what Fellman does well here - a portrait of the fullness of humanity. Which is apt, when a large part of the story webs around a painting made by Etoine, that captured a woman so perfectly it helped him unwittingly kickstart a revolution. With a deliberateness that Etoine lacks, Fellman has done that same act, capturing a perfect slice of a person - or three people - for us to appreciate. Like the portrait, it is necessarily artificial, built of obvious brush strokes and quirks of writing, but they make it all the more impactful. The art of it is the point, the beautiful writing worthy for its own sake, as well as for the whole portrait they leave us with at the end.

This is my first book from Fellman, but I will be seeking out other titles shortly after this! This was a truly special layered story, with incresible character work. Reading this really engaged my brain, as we are not often told what happened but have to tease apart details about the world. I would consider this more speculative literary fiction than sci-fi, but I do see why it could be marketed for a lite sci-fi crowd. On a personal note it is so special to me to read about unapologetically messy and real-feeling trans characters in an adult story. I feel like many trans books are YA, which is important but as someone who is not primarily a YA reader I jump at the chance to read trans characters in other settings.

Unfortunately I did end up DNF'ing this one fairly early on (around 30%ish). The writing style just didn't really work for me and the pacing of the book felt like it was dragging on and I got to a point where i just couldn't keep reading. I think that this book is definitely has an audience out there, that audience just isn't me; and while the summary did catch my attention when i first saw it, I just couldn't get into it once I started reading the actual book.

CW: war, injuries, child abuse

Okay, I finished this a couple of days ago and I'm still thinking about it. In fact, it left such an impression on me that I've pre-ordered the hardcover.

I'm not even sure what to say about this story. I see that it's tagged as being Sci-Fi, but it's not really? Other than that it is set in a far-flung future and set in a made up place. Otherwise, I didn't get Sci-Fi vibes from this book at all.

This is really just the story of a family, who found themselves over the years. Griffon ran away from his birth father, who was terrible and abusive, and found a home with Zaffre and Etoine, two married trans artists who had fled their homeland after their intimate involvement with a failed revolution.

It took me a while to get into it, as it jumps around A LOT, from the first person accounts of Griffon to Etoine's journal entries, but once I got into it, I WAS INTO IT.

I found it incredibly moving how Griffon, Zaffre, and Etoine are all trying to do their best for each other, while coming from very different backgrounds and carrying very different traumas. Over the course of the book they all hurt each other in various ways, but their love for each other always comes through.

The ending absolutely wrecked me; it's so beautiful and emotional and just kind of everything.

This is my first read from Isaac Fellman. This is a very layered story that covers a multitude of topics (societal gender dynamics, political unease and revolution, grief and family trauma). The prose is well written but there were many unanswered questions about the society described and pacing was slower. This is definitely a book for folks who like character deep dives, these were complex characters that demand analysis and discussion. This is definitely a book club book, there is so much to discuss regarding gender, views on bodily autonomy, intimacy, and more but I will refrain from listing them all to avoid spoilers.

We follow Griffin Keming and adopted parents Zaffre and Etoine, a family individually and collectively navigating transgender identity and experiences. Griffin learns more about their parents through journal entries, finding out about the hardships that they faced (mental illness and alcoholism) and how they got involved with a political revolution. I would be interested in a sequel to carry on these discussions and learn more details about this futuristic world.

Thank you to Tor Books and NetGalley for the opportunity to review an advanced copy of this novel.

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.

I was not the target audience for this one at all…. I like science fiction and fantasy for leisure reading with the occasional cozy mystery or graphic novel as a palate cleanser. I’ve got to admit I’m not sure why this one was classified as science fiction aside from being in a far future? city. I can see recommending this one to a reader who likes literary fiction and wants something focused on trans issues. But I think a solid 9 out of 10 sci-fi readers would start this and put it right back down…. I’m sorry, and thank you for letting me look it over.

This has all the pieces I usually gravitate toward—queer characters, complicated family dynamics, themes around art and identity—but the way it’s put together didn’t quite work for me. The structure is intentionally fragmented and slow, and that’s a hard combo when you’re trying to connect with the characters. It ends up feeling distant even when the emotions should land.

I can see why some people love this. The writing has moments of real clarity, and the ideas are strong. But the pacing dragged for me, and I never fully settled into the story. It felt like it was keeping me at arm’s length the whole time.

I’m still glad books like this exist. I just don’t think this one was for me.

Despite the strange, futuristic setting and the slowly revealed backstory to the titular regicide, this was much more a literary character study than a sci-fi or an epic story of revolution. All three of the central characters — Griffon, Etoine, and Zaffre— were pulled apart to expose their flaws, their rage, arrogance, and indifference, their struggles with addiction, mental illness, trauma, and repression, their strain and fumbling but earnest attempts to be a family, their tragedy and how they kept living through it.
The two aspects that grabbed me the most were the reflection of Griffon as an adult on Etoine and Zaffre’s parenting of him -- the difficulty and in some ways failure to fit a certain idea of family, and the complexities of all three’s experiences/journeys with gender and transition. As Griffon grew from a teenager to an adult, his understanding of his parents and himself deepened, becoming more empathetic, but also unforgiving in a way. There was no doubt to the love within their family. Still, their relationships were also so much them desperately clinging to each other to stay upright, a necessity as much as a choice. And there was no shying away from the difficulty of parenting just because they chose to be a family, especially with all of them fighting so hard with their own struggles and trauma.
Then with their transitions and understanding of being trans -- I enjoy the way they navigate societies with different norms for trans people. Stephensport's "acceptance" for trans people that allows for social transition but not medical transition touched on some interesting commentary around policing how people can be trans. Zaffre's and Etoine's different responses to this edict and the effects it had on their journeys were integrated into their characters so well.

I wish Zaffre’s perspective could have been incorporated somehow. She’s fascinating through others' eyes, but I longed for her story through her own. There must have been so much unseen.

DNF at 33%. I was expecting this to be a lot more compelling and to be a book I’d fly through because I wanted to find out what was really going on. Instead, this had no plot, just dialogue that wasn’t really about anything, and all of the characters were so alike that it was hard to keep track of who was who and what each person’s relationship to each other was.

thank you to NetGalley and Tor Books for providing me with an advance copy of this book to review!

IS this the slowest-paced book of all time? I actively did not enjoy reading this because it went so so slowly, and nothing hit like it should have because of the pacing. the writing is certainly not bad, it just did nothing for me. also, the sci-fi part was almost certainly not needed and just made me more confused.

obviously ignore the dumbass transphobes giving this book one star without actually reading it, but unfortunately this just didn't do it for me. it is verrrry trans though so that may entice you!

Notes From A Regicide are an assembly of reflections from a transman dealing with the loss of the only family he has ever known and writings of a historical revolution taken up by that man's very family.

it is a somewhat confusing read at the
beginning though I feel that is intentional. As the main character's understanding of his foster parents clarify so to does the narrative. Unfortunately, it is quite a slough to get to that point.

Still, there are quite a few impactful scenes and the characters within Griffon's life are quite intense and complex. Stephen and yhe like are unbelievable in their roles. They fidnt feel like real people but rather poetic caricatures.

I loved Dead Collections, so I was really excited for this one. Fellman’s writing is as sharp and intimate as ever, and the exploration of trans identity, family, and grief is beautifully done. The fragmented structure and soft sci-fi elements create an atmospheric, dreamlike read. The worldbuilding is elusive—more of a backdrop than a fully realized setting—which may not work for every reader. If you love quiet, introspective sci-fi with rich character studies, this is worth picking up.

I really wanted to love this book - I had seen so much potential in The Two Doctors Gorski, Fellman's previous novel, that I had high hopes for this one. Unfortunately, I think it wasn't for me. There is still a lot of charm to the writing - a clear voice and unique look on the world - but after 25%, I still couldn't get into the plot and world, and so I decided to DNF.
The book is structured around two POVs: Griffon's, a trans boy adopted by a trans couple, Etoine and Zaffre, and Etoine's point of view, as reported from some of his journals during his time in prison. I felt that Griffon's storyline was much more compelling and engaging, while I had a hard time understanding what was going on with Etoine's.
This is set in a futuristic time, quite different to our current one, but still unkind to trans people (to say the least). The world-building is quite elusive, though, and I couldn't really see the point it was serving.
If you're comfortable with mysterious fantasy, as in not understanding what is going on, at least for a while, and letting yourself be carried along with minimal plot, this could still very much be for you. Again, there are a lot of qualities to the writing, and Griffon's storyline about his coming out as a trans boy held a lot of promise. I would have liked more of that, and less of the strange happenings in Etoine's POV.

A video review of the book will be included in my March Reading Wrap Up on YouTube, to be posted in early April.

I often love a book that makes me slightly melancholic, and I adored this. The delving into the history of loved ones to get a better understanding of them after they are gone. Having a background in history and archiving, this is like the perfect book for me. It is very much a character study and hones in on the relationships and the care this found family has for each other. The overall setting was really interesting for me too, this future world and the political intrigue therein. The pair of revolutionaries who left their home to start anew and end up taking in someone who needs their care, even if they feel like they might do more harm than good.

mind bending and totally out there and wicked. for fans of We Used To Live Here. So good ! and so fun.

DNF at about 30% of the way through. I found the sci-fi elements of this very interesting, but unfortunately I found the pacing incredibly slow. I think that people who enjoy a slowly unravelling character study may enjoy this. If you are someone who reads a lot of literary fiction and want to try more scifi, this might work for you. Thank you to the publisher for the gifted copy!