Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook
Genres: fantasy, relationship fiction, science fiction
Pages: 336
Published by Tor Books on April 15, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
Notes from a Regicide is a heartbreaking story of trans self-discovery with a rich relatability and a science-fictional twist from award-winning author Isaac Fellman.
When your parents die, you find out who they really were.
Griffon Keming’s second parents saved him from his abusive family. They taught him how to be trans, paid for his transition, and tried to love him as best they could. But Griffon’s new parents had troubles of their own – both were deeply scarred by the lives they lived before Griffon, the struggles they faced to become themselves, and the failed revolution that drove them from their homeland. When they died, they left an unfillable hole in his heart.
Griffon’s best clue to his parents’ lives is in his father’s journal, written from a jail cell while he awaited execution. Stained with blood, grief, and tears, these pages struggle to contain the love story of two artists on fire. With the journal in hand, Griffon hopes to pin down his relationship to these wonderful and strange people for whom time always seemed to be running out.
In Notes from a Regicide, a trans family saga set in a far-off, familiar future, Isaac Fellman goes beyond the concept of found family to examine how deeply we can be healed and hurt by those we choose to love.
My Review:
The story begins at the end, which doesn’t mean that either the narrator or the reader is in any way spoiled about how it began. Because that’s the point of it from the beginning.
Griffon Keming is trying to understand who his parents really were before they became his parents, now that their larger-than-life personas are no longer there to get in the way of that knowing. And because they’re gone, and he misses them, he’s trying to process that grief and that absence and memorialize them – at least for himself. Or perhaps in a way that’s JUST for himself, as a way of bringing them back to life one last time.
But he only knew his parents after the point in which they came into each other’s lives, when he was fifteen and they were into their forties. The places and events that made Zaffre and Etoine Keming, and the things that made them famous, were already behind them. Already memories and nightmares that may still have influence but they have no desire to exhume for either the enlightenment or the amusement of their adopted son.
So, in the wake of their passing, in what was once Zaffre and Etoine’s New York City apartment, Griffon discovers the writings his father left behind. An angry, angst-filled, sometimes ranting and raging diary of his decades of sobriety, and a manuscript that Etoine had titled Autoportrait, Blessê in his native language, Stephensportois.
But that autobiography wasn’t so much an autobiography of Etoine as it was an attempt to immortalize Zaffre, the woman he loved so much that, once upon a time, he killed a king for her.
Escape Rating B: There are multiple avenues of approach to Notes from a Regicide. The above was the way I got into this book and found my way through it, but it may tell a different story for each reader.
For some, the most obvious point of entry may be that Griffon, Etoine and Zaffre were all trans, and this is the story of the family they created together out of love and choice. A family that was far from perfect but that worked for them and that nurtured Griffon into a healthy adulthood after a childhood filled with physical and emotional abuse.
It can be interpreted as three broken people who made each other strong in their broken places – which were legion and not limited to Zaffre’s neurodiversity, Etoine’s alcoholism and the mental contortions Griffon forced himself to go through in order to protect his birth father from the consequences of his abuse of his own child. No one comes out of any of those things unscathed.
And then there’s the part that initially caught my curiosity, the question raised by the title. Who was the ruler, and where, and why were they murdered? That’s where the story slips into speculative fiction – somewhere on the border between science fiction and fantasy.
Because Stephensport is one of those places that’s on no map we know, that perhaps may have or will exist in a bit of a fever dream – or a drunken hallucination. And the story of Stephensport is the story of a bloody revolution that arose in paranoia and ended in exile, that brought down a tyranny and ended a dream and a nightmare at the same time.
Exactly how a reader will feel about Stephensport and the rebellion that Etoine accidentally fomented and Zaffre willingly fostered will depend a lot on how much one wants to believe it happened versus just how unreliable a narrator one believes Etoine to be. And I’m not at all sure but fascinated either way.
And if part of that fascination is related to T. Kingfisher’s Sworn Soldier series that begins with the chilling and awesome folkloric horror of What Moves the Dead, set in the equally fictional country of Ruravia, that’s just fine with this reader.
In the end – as it was in the beginning – Notes from a Regicide is two things for certain. It’s a passionate love story between two beautifully damaged people, Zaffre and Etoine, because that’s the way Etoine wrote his Autoportrait. And it’s a son’s last love letter to the parents of his heart.
