#up there for me with nicholas and gelis (who will probably always be my favourite het marriage)

[leojurand]

i'm 60% into busman's honeymoon (enjoying it immensely) and it's so refreshing to read about a couple who adore each other and have endless chemistry, who follow each other's thoughts because they're both witty and intelligent... a couple who you read about and think, yeah, i get why they're together and why they're in love!

i'm allergic to m/f usually both because i prefer gay shit and because so many authors put zero effort into writing the romance in their novels (this is especially true in speculative fiction, from my experience). but when i read a romance like this it's really like wow. maybe i'm not as heterophobic as i thought maybe i just want a good fucking romance!! an amazing discovery

also, for the love of god, we need more married couples in fiction. i love slow burns and will-they-won't-theys as much as anyone else but. give me more husbands and wives. AND also exes

[leojurand]

house of niccolò reread rambling thoughts: niccolò rising edition (part 2)

70% into the reread so i have a couple more thoughts about this book!

(which i'm enjoying a lot but man, if this were one of my favourites i would have a thousand things to say at this point... but we'll get to that eventually (in book 3))

2.1: the introduction of THEE dunnett fmc

this part of the story is mostly focused on bruges and nicholas's relationship with the charetty business and specifically marian. tobie and julius completely disappear, which is a shame! i really like tobie's role in the story; he's a great supporting character for nicholas. and i love julius, somehow! following him now, after finishing the series and knowing, is so much more interesting too.

but anyway, the character we get to know in this part is gelis!! marvelous gelis. she's such a funny teenage girl. i completely forgot her first scene with nicholas is them skating together and nicholas imitating people and telling her jokes... no wonder she was obsessed with him after lol. the funny part though is gelis interrogating nicholas's lovers after to know how he's in bed 😭 what a menace.

after rereading her scenes in this book i really don't get the review calling her a philippa knock-off? their roles are completely different and, no offense, but gelis has an actual personality lol because she has more than one scene!

my favourite part is her confrontation with nicholas in chapter 29, for many reasons. i love that nicholas comes out swinging, because he doesn't do that with anyone else! he always tries to tell people what they want to hear, and he turns up the charm. he did that with gelis too, at first. now it's almost like he thinks she's too smart to fall for it. there's also this:

“Now stop poking into my affairs and remember that I can hurt your sister a lot more than you can hurt me.”

★ gelis will remember that

2.2: it's a lovely morning in bruges and you're a horrible claes

one of my favourite things about this book as an introduction to the series, and especially as an introduction to nicholas de fleury, is that we get to see claes living his life in bruges, like a normal boy. we learn about his pranks but we also see them, we see what his neighbours think about him. we see him hang out with his friends, who aren't very good friends, unsurprisingly. i was happy to notice sersanders, who has a small role in to lie with lions, actually being nice to nicholas. he defends claes when felix is unfair to him; he helps claes take off his ice skates; it's sweet!

and it's little details like this that make nicholas feel very real to me. like he had a life before the series started, and not just a backstory for the readers to wonder about, but an actual life. it's very good! compare that to lymond in the game of kings. we don't see his day to day, we don't know how his life looked like in scotland. which makes perfect sense, but it creates distance between lymond and the reader, i think. nicholas feels more like a friend.

(something similar happens with gemini vs checkmate, i think, because in gemini we get little scenes that show the de fleurys' life and their bond as a family and it's beautiful. we don't get that in checkmate because everything is a mess lol and i think that's a shame)

tl;dr: i love getting to see nicholas being a normal boy being a menace in bruges, i think it humanizes him a lot, which is very important because of everything he's going to do in the future.

i probably could say more about what i've read so far but this is, once more, so long... so i'll just talk about whatever i forgot to mention here in the last part, when i finish :)

[leojurand]

house of niccolò reread rambling thoughts: niccolò rising edition (part 1)

roughly 25% into my NR i'm having the time of my life and also have more thoughts than i anticipated! so post it is.

niccolò rising was, on first read, one of my least favourite dunnett novels. which isn't anything bad at all since i love all her books, it was just not on the same level of insanity as most others. probably bottom 5

also i've always thought this was a fun book, but coming here right after checkmate makes it especially fun lol

so here's the ramble!

starting with nicholas, in his claes era! and god, he's perfect (but ofc i say that, he's my favourite protagonist ever). i found him fascinating on first read, but reading this again after seeing nicholas's growth, after seeing him as a father and husband in gemini... it really shows what an incredible character he is! i've tweeted about this before, and i think some fans didn't agree, but when i read lymond i had this feeling that the person that is francis crawford already existed before the events of the series, and throughout it i slowly unraveled the truth of who that is, as lymond allows us to see, or is forced to show, his true self. but with nicholas there is a sense of becoming. there was no nicholas de fleury before the series, we see him transform into that version of himself. when it comes to nicholas there's a lot of discussion of identity; the idea that he had none, and every aspect of himself was an act, a role he was playing to achieve his goals. and only towards the end he becomes who he truly is.

there are some moments on this reread already that made me feel nicholas was learning, or becoming as i said, like this exchange with tobie:

“You haven’t the choice,” said Tobie. “No one has.” The other was silent. It was a deliberate silence. Tobie pressed him. “You’d never thought of that?” said Tobie. “I think of people dependent on me,” said Claes. The cellar was cold, but he sat quite still, his crossed arms tight round his body. “But no one needs to shoulder my burdens.” “Not even the people who are dependent on you?” said Tobie. That disturbed the boy a little. He said, “You and Meester Julius are not.”

you can almost see the wheels turning in his head, whether because he's learning something new or he's trying to find the right combination of words that will make tobie do what nicholas wants him to do, i don't know! but it's a very interesting conversation.

i could talk about nicholas for hours, both analysing every gesture or straight up gushing, but i'll move on

next is julius, a polarising? maybe straight up unpopular? character. i'm a big fan tbh. i've always thought he's wildly entertaining, the funniest character even, if not super complex. but the reveal at the end of the series does give me a lot more to chew on in this reread wrt his character, so i'm glad!! i really don't know who julius truly is, which is crazy because he seems so simple on the surface? does he care about nicholas at all? he's pretty protective of claes, at first. but how much of it is genuine, if anything? i also really like his dynamic with tobie, they both pay attention to the other like they're wary, maybe. but anyway, i'll pay special attention to julius this time. what a fun, evil little guy lol

katelina!! i've joked about her being the only brown-haired dunnett female character who is a mess. i'm noticing a lot of subtlety with her this time. for example, i think she's funny that she calls julius, claes, and felix "children" in the first chapter, when she's only 19. but she's been traveling with older people, and living 3 years by herself on scotland probably makes her feel more grown and mature than these bruges boys. in her first pov chapter she compares edinburgh and bruges, and in those descriptions you can really tell she missed her hometown. she thinks she wishes she were a widow, to have freedom and independence. and in her bluntness and mockery of simon i saw something of gelis, too. though gelis's tongue is sharper, and she has a madness katelina lacks, as nicholas thinks later on. i think i'm going to connect more with her on this reread... which will make her fate even more sad.

now some more random thoughts:

nicholas's blank expression, and the way he keeps his distance when they meet esota, hits really hard knowing what she did to him. god. and the fact he didn't even want to punish her makes me so sad

the way nicholas and umar become friends so quickly, speaking in sign language and bits of whatever language they share, is so sweet 😭 big boys who are mistreated and much more intelligent than anyone gives them credit for!!

mentioned this on twitter too, but kathi being one of the children nicholas plays with and who adores him is the cutest thing ever

i can't help but hate marian a little. every time there's a mention of nicholas arriving at her home at 10, being brought up with her children, and knowing what happened to him as a child... i just hate that she turned their relationship sexual, i don't care if she was grieving

claes crying after his duel with simon was heartbreaking, knowing that he's not crying because he almost died or because he's in pain, but because he just wanted to be recognized by his father. and to him that duel and simon's pure dislike of him probably meant that it would never happen :( my baby

that's it for now!! but i'll be back. i'm so happy to be back in this world with these characters :') n. 1 series!!