A photo of Felicia Davin
Hi.
I’m Felicia Davin, a writer and reader of romance, fantasy, and science fiction.
A photo of Felicia Davin
I’m Felicia Davin, a writer and reader of romance, fantasy, and science fiction.
The Mischievous Letters of the Marquise de Q (Book 2) | Title TBA (Book 3)
“Davin’s book feels genuinely, shockingly rebellious in its insistence on the beauty of transformation. If overhyped books are plastic necklaces, this serial is a string of natural pearls, each a luminous gem on its own but even more exquisite in sequence.”
Paris, 1823. Victor Beauchêne has led a stifling existence, unrecognized for both his cleverness and his gender, except in the pages of his meticulous diary. Abruptly cut off from his family’s fortune, he takes the opportunity to start a new life in a shabby boarding house with his beloved spinster aunt Sophie. There, he stumbles upon two kinds of magic: a pen with eerie powers of persuasion and a reserved, alluring art student named Julien.
Brilliant, unconventional Julien is also Julie, a person whose magical paintings can transform their body or enchant viewers. Haunted by a terrible episode in their past, they’ve come to Paris for artistic success—the ordinary, non-magical kind. Victor, too handsome and far too inquisitive, is a dangerous distraction from their ambitions.
Drawn to each other, Victor and Julie strike up a cautious correspondence of notes slid under doors. It soon unfolds into a passionate romance. Outside the bedroom, their desires clash: Julie wants to distance herself from the world of magic and Victor wants to delve deeper. When the ruthless abuser from Julie’s past resurfaces, he aims to take control of her powers and ruin more lives. Victor and Julie are the only ones who can stop him. Do they trust each other enough to survive the threat to their love and their lives?
The Scandalous Letters of V and J is a historical fantasy romance with two nonbinary main characters, told primarily in letters and diary entries. It is approximately 100,000 words long and sexually explicit.
Published May 16, 2023
“But bodies and identity are never a space for trauma in this book—only for joy, attraction, experimentation, and play. Within their sexual and romantic relationship, Victor and Julien are perpetually trying on different roles, different acts, even different bodily configurations, unfettered by the constraints of what’s allowable to a person of this or that gender.”
This series takes place in a violent, unjust world, and there are some abominable villains in it. I wanted to write fantasy that wasn’t about armies or the fate of nations, but with more individual stakes. In practice, that means the villains deal in intimate violence. There is abuse in this book. There is also violent vengeance against the abusers. I can’t promise that I’ve written things in a way that won’t hurt you, but I hope this note helps you make the right choices for yourself. Here is a more specific list of what you will find in this book.
A major character has been disowned by their family. It is primarily motivated by greed over inheritance, but not entirely unrelated to the character’s gender and sexuality. This situation comes up repeatedly throughout the book.
A major character changes their name as part of a gender transition, and their deadname occurs a few times in the text—when they strategically choose to say it, and not when it is weaponized against them by others.
A major character has lost their mother to a long illness, years prior to the book. It is mentioned several times.
A major character has been groomed and emotionally abused by an adult when they were a teenager.
A major character is groped without their consent while they are magically stupefied, also without their consent.
There is violence (stabbing and blood) and murder. There is also discussion of drinking blood and a brief discussion of antisemitic blood libel.
A supporting character is in an abusive marriage. (She’ll get a happy ending in book two.)
There is sex in this book. Most of the scenes are explicit with regard to genitalia. Both main characters are nonbinary. One of them can shapeshift with magic; the other cannot. Nonbinary gender exists independent of what kind of body a person has. Though I have not always followed all of their advice, I am indebted to Xan West/Corey Alexander and their writings on trans and nonbinary erotica. May their memory be a blessing.
Some of the sex scenes feature power exchange. There is some other light kink, namely roleplay (including some play with gender) and consensual bondage.
The main characters in this book use multiple pronouns (he/she/they for one of them, for instance). Singular they is perfectly correct in English. In contemporary French, there is now the corresponding nonbinary pronoun “iel,” among several other options. Though nonbinary people existed in early 19th century France when this book is set, “iel” is a later innovation. French typically genders its nouns and adjectives as masculine or feminine, but the convention when referring to a nonbinary person is to write, for instance, “étudiant.e” (instead of ”étudiant” or ”étudiante”) or “grand.e” so the word is both and neither. This convention didn’t come up in the book I wrote in English, but it’s cool, so I wanted to tell you about it.
The magic in this book breaks the laws of the universe as we know them in our own world. Since I had already flagrantly disregarded physics, history and prescriptivist grammar were trivial to me. Language is whatever we want it to be.
(This project ran from February 15, 2023 to May 8, 2023 and is now concluded. It was a lot of fun!)
Because The Scandalous Letters of V and J is an epistolary novel, meaning it’s primarily composed of letters and diary entries, I thought it might be fun to send it as letters (electronically, that is—sadly I don’t have the funds to mail you all actual paper letters!).
I saw how much fun people were having with Dracula Daily, which sends the letters from the novel Dracula by their dates, and I’ve also been enjoying the romance novel that Alexis Hall has been sending, chapter by chapter, to his newsletter subscribers, so I thought I would try something similar. Scandalous Letters is also set in the 1820s, just a few years before the explosion in popularity of print newspapers. Most 1830s newspapers had serialized novels below the fold on the front page, which is a nice little nineteenth-century connection for this digital project.
The daily emails will usually contain a few short letters or diary entries. I imagine the emails will be a quick read on most days, with just an occasional longer read where something really juicy happens.