★★★☆☆ Velveteen vs. The Consequences of Her Actions, by Seanan McGuire
Our Seanan finishes her oldest series
Not having an actual cover for Velveteen vs the Consequences of her Actions, I made a montage of previous Velveteen covers.
Velveteen vs. The Consequences of Her Actions
Seanan McGuire
Our Seanan finishes her oldest series
Prolific Urban Fantasy author Seanan McGuire has published a lot of novels. Some of them are standalone and some are in series. Her longest series, still in progress, are October Daye, Incryptid, and Wayward Children. How long these will eventually be is anyone’s guess.
Her oldest series, however, is Velveteen vs. It began in 2008 as a series of stories on her blog and her live-journal. Some of these have been collected in three books that you can purchase on Amazon, but they can all still be read for free. I have collected the links in my reviews of the books: Velveteen vs. The Junior Super Patriots, Velveteen vs. the Multiverse, and Velveteen vs. the Seasons. I don’t promise that all those links work, but if you find that any are broken, let me know and I’ll see if I can hunt down working links. On her website McGuire introduces the series as follows,
The Velveteen stories began in 2008 as an open-ended series about a superhero universe where cosmic powers not only came with great responsibility, they came with great legislation, merchandising, and focus group oversight. Many young heroes were effectively "adopted" by a corporate entity known as The Super Patriots, Inc., which promised to teach them how to best control their amazing gifts.
Velma Martinez, Velveteen, is one of the superheroes. Her super-power is the ability to animate dolls and stuffed animals. (She can stretch these definitions at times—I think her rule is that if, it has eyes, she can animate it.) She is at the start a second-tier hero—less powerful than, for instance, Action Dude (who is more or less superboy). Velma is clever and resourceful, though, and ends up in practice being a major hero.
McGuire continued to publish occasional Velveteen vs stories on her blog and her Patreon. On 26-October-2023 she announced on her Patreon that she was going to finish up a fourth volume of Velveteen vs stories.
As some people have been asking, the currently extant installments in volume four, with their numbers for where they fall in-series, are:
#51. vs. Recovery
#52. vs. Temptation
#53. vs. Dr. Darwin
#54. vs. Gainful Employment
Volume four's subtitle is "Velveteen vs. The Consequences of Her Actions," which isn't ominous at all, and I am going to finish it. I won't be posting the whole thing here, as not everyone cares about Velveteen, and it would take over the Patreon completely for a year if I did that, but...
I’ve been collecting links to the stories here as they came out. On 6-August-2025 she released the final installment of Velveteen vs. The Consequences of Her Actions, and perhaps, of the entire series. Here are the links.
54. Velveteen vs Gainful Employment
55. Velveteen Presents The Princess vs the Congressional Committee for Superhuman Oversight
58. Velveteen vs. True Love's Kiss
59. Velveteen vs. The Parliamentarian
60. Velveteen Presents Tag vs. Being Alive
62. Velveteen Presents Jacqueline Claus vs. Existence
63. Velveteen vs. the United States Government
64. Velveteen vs. The Uncomfortable Resolution
Presumably these will all be collected in a real book some day. For now, though, you’ll need to go on Patreon for most of them. (Hint: if you buy a subscription for US$1/month, you can download all of them along with around a hundred other stories. You can immediately cancel that subscription after downloading all the goodies if you want. I don’t particularly recommend that. I think $1/month is a good value for a continuing subscription.)
So, I enjoyed this. As the title suggests, it is mostly concerned with tying up loose ends left hanging from the previous Velveteen stories.