Last week was Trans Rights Readathon and I managed to read 6 and ¼ books! Thanks to you all, I was also able to fundraise a total of $250 for Brave Space Alliance, a Black-led, trans-led LGBTQ+ center in southside Chicago. 

While my personal fundraiser is over, there are still plenty of ways to support the trans community such as donating to Mercury Stardust’s fundraiser. Mercury is trying to raise 1 million dollars for Point of Pride, an organization that provides gender-affirming medical care to trans folks across the country and around the world. I’m planning to do another week of reading trans books to raise money for Mercury’s fundraiser and invite you to either donate and/or help spread the word!

Originally I had planned to record short reviews for each book as I finished them, but because of life, I didn’t have the time. So I’ll just have to review each book here. Beware, there will be spoilers!

Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon

This was a surprisingly quiet and introspective book considering how violent it is. The entire premise is that Vern is a young pregnant person who escapes a creepy cult and discovers that the cult may have infected her with a fungi type thing. It’s not a hundred percent clear. Vern tries to raise her children in the wild but realizes that she needs help when the cult nearly kills her children. She takes shelter with Gogo and their aunt. Then the cult catches up with them and Vern has to return to settle matters once and for all.

There are parts of this book that I loved, but other parts that weren’t as developed. I love Vern’s difficulty with her children and with the idea of being a parent. She is fifteen when the story starts and Solomon writes about her trauma, her sexual assault, and the struggle of being a child bride and parent with so much tenderness and compassion. It’s also nice to see stories that acknowledge that children aren’t the best thing to happen to parents and oftentimes parenthood sucks – especially when severe, unaddressed trauma controls our impulses and thoughts.

I also love Vern’s relationship with Gogo, although I feel that Gogo and her aunt could have used more development. But I loved the thorniness in their relationship and the acknowledgement that love can’t cure trauma, but even the traumatized can find love.

I adored the horror moments in this book and hope that someday Solomon writes a straight out horror book. Similar to The Hell Followed Us by A. J. White, this book deals with religious cults and painful metamorphosis because of experimentation. Vern’s transformation into mushroom person was really interesting although I would have liked a better sense of what exactly she looked like and why anyone wanted mushroom people. 

Honestly, the book is at its strongest when it is dealing with trauma and the aftermath and after effect of being traumatized. It is an introspective book with the trappings of a horror cult story and I think that’s the biggest issue I had with the book.

It was structurally uneven and I don’t think it knew what it wanted the antagonist to be. A good ⅔ of the book is about Vern surviving on her own, being reintroduced to society, and then addressing her trauma and I think if it stuck with Vern’s relationships and internal feelings and sort of left this cult as this phantom thing in the background that left Vern scarred, but denying us a resolution on that front, this book would have been 5 stars. 

Instead, Solomon reintroduces a character randomly at the last third of the book and suddenly we’re racing through an explanation about why the cult was created, why Vern was turning into a mushroom person, and then we resolved the cult problem in a chapter or two (and there are some resurrection I have a lot of worldbuilding questions about). 

The book also suffered from a lack of a fleshed out villain (there are at least three personifications of the main culprit but none of these personifications feel like real characters). Two of the antagonists are written to have a bond with Vern, but the relationship is so shoestring thin, I wasn’t sure if we, as readers, were actually supposed to feel betrayed or sad when those storylines wrap up. 

Overall, there were some structural issues, but the first ⅔ thirds of this book are heartbreaking and are when Solomon is at their strongest as a writer. While I didn’t enjoy this as much as An Unkindness of Ghosts or the Deep, I still enjoyed this book and look forward to what Solomon writes next. 

The Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas

This is a cute, sweet book. The basic premise is that Yadriel is a trans boy desperately trying to be accepted by his family of brujx and their goddess: Lady Death. Some brujx, seemingly mostly men, lead the souls to the afterlife and manage misbehaving souls while some brujx, seemingly mostly women, can heal. Yadriel wakes up a ghost, with the intention of laying their spirit to rest and, thus, proving he is a bruja (and a man), but the ghost won’t go away and it turns out the ghost is connected to a large string of murders. 

This is a strongly written book with a strong voice and fun characters. I loved the dive into the worldbuilding and the intertwining of Aidan’s magic system with Latinx holidays and tradition. I also enjoyed the exploration of Julian’s family life and contrasting with Yadriel’s family life and the discussion about blood family versus chosen family. The pace is fast-paced and overall the story is very entertaining. I really loved Julian as a character (I have a soft spot for the “troublemaker” with a heart of gold) and was sometimes more interested in his story and the story of his friends than Yadriel’s story. There was a questionable last minute resurrection at the end that I saw coming a mile away, but also was a little anti-climatic (but as you can tell from my absolutely favorite books I read this week, I like a lot of death and angst in my stories)

I had a question about the worldbuilding, though, that affects how I feel about the ending. It’s unclear if the magic system itself follows the gender binary or if Yadriel’s family instituted rules to force it to follow the gender binary. Like, Yadriel is able to manage spirits because he is a man and it’s very clear he can’t heal, but that makes it sound like gender is coded on a biological (or magical) level which feels…weird. 

Like would Yadriel be any less of a man if he could heal instead of manage spirits? What happens to a non-binary or agender person? Do they not get magical abilities at all? The book makes one reference to non-binary brujx, but never returns to it and Yadriel’s identity is tied to being a man and it’s mentioned many times that Yadriel won’t feel like a man unless he proves he’s a bruja, which makes sense. Gender is a social construct and you want to engage in activities that support or affirm your gender. I just think it’s a dangerous argument to make that Yadriel is a man because he wields magic like a man because then it could also be argued that if Yadriel didn’t wield masculine coded magic, he’s a woman. And I just wish it was clearer if that kind of think is built into the magic system (because then fuck the Lady of Death) or if it’s just the family’s way of thinking and the Lady of Death is far more fluid with how she divvies out magical abilities. 

And then this connects to the resolution of poor Tío Castriz’s storyline and Yadriel’s family in general. First off, I gave Lady Death a hard side-eye when she was like ‘oh Poor Castriz, bullied his entire life because he doesn’t have an ability I gifted to the family, but it was his greed and pain that led him down this dark path”. Like, no, Castriz did what he did because the family’s understanding of their own magic and tradition is fucked up and I wish there had been more discussion within the family about his fate and their role in that darkness. It also connects to my issue that using bruja magic makes Yadriel a man because it almost supports Castriz’s argument that if Yadriel didn’t have magic or used feminine coded magic, then the family would still struggle to accept him. I just feel that not enough work was done on the family side to actually acknowledge the harm they caused Castriz and Yadriel, and their acceptance of Yadriel hinged so much on this magical (or magical biological) signifier of “masculinity”. There are a few lines of the family needing to rethink things and Yadriel’s journey not being over, but I just wish there was more discussion about the hurt Castriz and Yadriel felt and a stronger acknowledgement and even a promise of work from the family to address those harms. 

Overall, though, this is a fun book that explores love, loss, and coming of age as a trans boy. 

Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee

So I absolutely ADORED this book and immediately checked out the next two books in the series the minute I finished reading it. It’s by no means perfect, but it was a lot of fun and I love the fucked up relationship between Jedao and Cheris and the cutthroat nature of the world. The basic premise is that Cheris has been handed an impossible mission after disgracing herself during combat and must rely on the advice of an undead general to help defeat a rebellion in an important quadrant in the empire. The undead general is grafted into her mind and she must figure out if he is truly as mad as everyone says he is or if there’s a deeper conspiracy going on. 

The reason I love this book so much is because of the relationship between Jedao and Cheris. It’s not necessarily a game of cat and mouse because Cheris is so unprepared for Jedao’s presence in her mind. It’s more like a game of truth or dare mixed with two truths and a lie. I don’t think Jedao ever outright lies to Cheris, but he never tells the full truth and he is constantly manipulating her in ways that she sometimes doesn’t even notice until it’s far too late, culminating in a fantastic ending and great sacrifice on Cheris’ part. Cheris is an interesting character because she’s been prepared to be subservient, especially to authority figures, but also has enough initiative to make decisions on her own, but her deference to authority not only makes it almost impossible to resist Jedao, but can make her disappear beneath his personality and his games. I still really like her, but her personality does get lost sometimes. The other characters around Cheris aren’t really developed either, so only Jedao and the subservients (robot servants) really stand out. 

The subservients stand out because they’re not supposed to and in a world like this, the hidden are the people you want to pay attention to (also they just have really cute, sweet personalities that make you fall in love with them, haha). Cheris also makes an effort to treat them nicely when she can and you can tell that side of her is what makes her so unique (besides her skills with math which is important per the world building). 

Jedao is just…Jedao, haha. He is this larger than life figure that has a terrible reputation (that is definitely deserved to be honest) with a questionable scheme. I may have to reread the ending again, but I have a lot of questions about his plan and why he committed the massacres he did. I think it was to trigger his imprisonment, but also not a hundred percent sure. His true story is told through flashbacks but they’re not in chronological order, so some things don’t quite make sense but also he may just be crazy. Who knows? Haha

The biggest flaw of this book is the worldbuilding. I almost put the book down because the first three chapters will make no sense beyond the fact that two leaders are playing games with each other, Cheris is in over her head, and Jedao is crazy. By chapter ten you realize that this world’s reality is controlled by a complex math system (known as a calendar) and reality can be rewritten by different calendars. Anything else beyond that is indecipherable and you sort of just have to accept it for what it is. But once you accept that you’ll never understand the physics of this world, you can focus on the relationship between Jedao and Cheris and start to piece together the long con that Jedao (and others) are planning. 

The other flaw is that the multiple cons and betrayals don’t quite add up, but again that may be on purpose because everyone who tries to manage this system goes mad. Or the multiple schemes are going to be further explored and defined in later books. There are also some POVs that are meant to introduce us to the horror of war and weigh heavily on Cheris but since we don’t know any of those characters before their POV is introduced and they only exist for a chapter, I don’t think those chapters have the full intended impact.  

Overall, this was a fun book about the horror of letting madmen run an authoritarian system and the price you’ll have to pay to literally burn the system to the ground. 

Depart, Depart by Sim Kern

I really wanted to like this book, but I think it is a good example of why novellas aren’t really for me. The premise of Depart, Depart is that a trans Jewish boy gets caught in a massive flood and has to relocate to a shelter. Because of the flood and being poor, he’s stuck in the shelter while being haunted by one of his relatives who escaped Nazi Germany as a child while the rest of his family died in the Holocaust. 

Overall, the premise is fascinating and I really loved the world and the characters, but my problem is that the number of ideas Kern was trying to juggle required a full length book. The short format of Depart, Depart didn’t give Kern enough time to explore any ideas of intergenerational trauma, climate change, survival, bigotry and oppression, toxic masculinity in the United States, struggles faced by the LGBTQ+ community faces in the United States, and being disconnected and then rediscovering Jewish identity Kern wanted to explore. 

Like I was enthralled by Noah’s struggles with being visited by his great-grandfather and his discussions with David about being a Jewish queer and how the echoes of the Holocaust, plus every other pogrom and massacre, follow Noah wherever he goes. I mean that alone could be a 1000 page book and you’d still only scratch the surface. I also enjoyed Kern writing about the LGBTQ+ experience during a massive disaster. I don’t think that is discussed enough at all in literature – fiction or nonfiction. And I always enjoy discussing the random fascist problem the United States has. But these ideas would be introduced and then we’d switch to a new topic and then we’d jump to another topic, so by the time we get to the ending the resolution is rushed and nothing is really resolved (like you know Noah letting his friends drown because he didn’t want to add more fuel to the fire that he was a worrywart), even though the characters act like everything’s been resolved. I finished the book and literally said, “if anything I have more questions.”

But I think that is a really personal critique from someone who finds short stories and novellas frustrating because they’re so short and compact, so take my comments about structure and pacing with a grain of salt. 

The other thing I’ve also been struggling with is how this book portrays its Vietnamese-American non-binary character. When Malone is introduced they’re introduced as non-binary and use they/them pronouns but when they talk about using the bathrooms (which involves taking a shower) Malone’s like “oh, sorry, Noah, I just use the women’s bathroom instinctively. Didn’t even stop to think it’d be a problem for trans people” and like…that’s not how it works? At least, in my experience as a non-binary person. Before I knew I was non-binary, I’d use the women’s bathroom because why wouldn’t I? But once I realized who I was, the bathroom problem became a painful conundrum that I am very aware of as being a problem for myself and for trans people. And like non-binary people also bind and some also go on T or E. The bathroom can also be a minefield for non-binary people and even if Malone is comfortable with using the women’s bathroom, they should still know it can be dangerous for people who don’t fit the gender binary. I can only imagine it’d be doubly dangerous in Texas. 

I also think the narrative played too hard into the “Malone may be non-binary but they’re passing as femme so they have no problems” which feels too much like the argument of “well if you’re ace, you pass as straight so you have no real problems and don’t belong in the LGBTQ+ community”. Like when Malone is introduced, we know their gender is they/them but within a few pages they were coded femme so strongly I actually forgot they were nonbinary (or Vietnamese but that’s a different problem) until another weird argument, which I’ll get into in a minute. It just felt like Malone had originally been written as just a cisgender (maybe white) lesbian and then changed to nonbinary at the last minute.

The other weird thing about Malone is that they spark the “oppressive olympics” conversation in the middle of the book. Malone hangs pride flags and Elena, a Mexican trans woman, tells them to take it down, but Malone is like no we should be proud and Elena says she is proud but Malone has no idea what she’s faced as a trans woman and Malone’s like of course I do. I’m a Vietnamese nonbinary person and then Elena’s like oh all you did was change your pronouns and you think that means you’ve struggled? And then the situation is defused by Agatha, who I think is a Black trans woman, who is like are we really doing the oppression olympics right now and then the conversation dies and Malone takes the flags down. 

But like that whole conversation is so weird. Like of course Malone, a nonbinary person, is going to know not to draw attention to them. Like their identity and presentation of identity is so policed and I feel that adding her Vietnamese to the mix makes their actions even weirder. White people have such fucked up ideas of how Vietnamese people should present, especially if you could be coded as femme. To have the spark of the oppression olympics be between a Mexican woman and a Vietnamese nonbinary person seems strangely tone deaf. And it’s not to say that those arguments don’t happen, but the way the situation is presented in the book feels more like Kern had a checkbox of things they wanted to include in the story, but didn’t stop to really think out who did what in this scene or had the space to have a proper discussion about oppression olympics. It’s even weirder, because there were other white queers in the story who could have put the flags up and then you’d still have the same conversation, but then it’s a white queer not thinking, which feels more like a conversation white writers should have and let the Vietnamese and Mexican writers discuss their own community’s issues with oppression olympics and racial biases. 

Overall, though I think this is an interesting book that many will enjoy, I just wish it was longer so these important topics could be fully developed. 

The Deep by Rivers Solomon

I just said I’m not a big fan of novellas, and yet I loved the Deep by Rivers Solomon. I think it’s a beautiful, almost fairytale-like look at intergenerational trauma and the weight a burden history/the past can be at times. The basic premise of the book is that Yetu is an under the water descendent of the pregnant slaves thrown overboard and she is also the historian for her people. That means she has to hold the trauma within her while everyone else gets to forget and go about their lives, until the Remembering ceremony, where Yetu gets to give those memories to her people for three days before having to take them back. During the Remembering, Yetu flees and meets a human whose people were murdered by colonizers and is desperate to preserve their memory. Yetu has to decide if she should return to her people who are trapped in the horrors of the past or remain free but rudderless and without an identity. 

Like all of Solomon’s books, this story aches with pain and loss but in a compassionate and soft manner. I loved Yetu as a character and completely understood her pain as she had to struggle with maintaining her people’s history all by herself and fully sympathized with her desire to run away. I also loved the difficult in Yetu’s relationship with her Amaba who just wanted her child to be “normal” but how could anyone be normal with that much trauma and pain in their heads. I was really annoyed actually that this community made one person carry all that horror and was relieved that the end found a way to honor Yetu and the fact that everyone needs help with severe and complex trauma. It’s a burden that one can deal with on their own. 

I also love Oori, the human Yetu meets. She is the last of Oshuben and feels responsible for protecting what remains of her people and their history. She is a great counter to Yetu’s desire for freedom from everything and I loved their various conversations about the past, our own identities, and how we find partners/friends. 

I think the ending wrapped up a little too neatly, especially given all the worse case scenarios that ran through Yetu’s head when she abandoned her people to handle their trauma on their own, and, similar to Cemetery Boys, I wish there had been more time for the family/community to not only acknowledge the great pain they were putting their historians through, but also how they deal with the trauma and their decision to share the responsibility of preserving their own history. Also, I may have read the ending wrong, but I think Oori’s people were the ancestors of Yetu’s people, so I think Oori’s people actually exist underwater now and if I read that correctly, that would have also been cool to explore further. 

Some sections of the writing were repetitive as well and the prose in general could have been tighter without sacrificing the dreamy, fairytale-like feeling. Overall, I really enjoyed this book and the world Solomons created. 

Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey

This is a fun, Western adventure with a strong LGBTQ+ cast. The basic premise is that Esther runs away from home after watching her girlfriend hand for banned materials. She hitches a ride with the Librarians, a group of non-binary and lesbians who are secretly working for the resistance. The Librarians are charged with smuggling three women into resistance country and it turns out one of the people they’re smuggling is an assassin. They get into a few gunfights and Esther needs to either learn how to be a rebel fast or die trying. 

I’m normally not a big Western fan and this book relies a lot of Western tropes, so it did lose my attention in a few places, but not because it’s bad or poorly written. It’s just not the type of story I usually like to read. That being said, I think if you love Westerns you’ll love this book. It’s has a standard Western plot but this time with lesbians and it’s in a post-apocalyptic United States. The characters are fun, if not fully developed, and there are plenty of shoot outs. There’s a romantic subplot that is….there haha and the plot is pretty simplistic, but works for this genre. Overall it was a very fun book. 

All the White Spaces by Ally Wilkes

I technically finished this book a day after the Trans Rights Readathon, but I’m reviewing it in this post anyway, haha. So I LOVE this book so much! It has everything one could possible want: polar adventures, LGBTQ+ characters, WWI trauma, a great unknown that is angry and/or hungry and/or just hates humanity (and can you blame them?) and lots of terrible, horrible decisions that make everything oh so much worse. 

The basic premise of that book is that Jonathan, a trans man, lost his brothers during WWI and decides to join their hero’s last polar expedition to make them proud and prove he is a man. To help him, he enlists the aid of a childhood friend, Harry (which turns out to be a terrible idea). He is quickly accepted by the crew and gets so much joy of being in this rough and very (toxic) masculine world. However, something has found them on their ship and it’s not happy with them. One thing goes wrong after another and they find themselves stranded in Antarctica in the middle of winter with no way of calling for help and being hunted by a thing. 

I’ll admit that the first half of this book is very slow and probably could have been tightened in edits, but once you get to the halfway mark, the pace picks up and it roars towards a very satisfying ending (with plenty of bloodshed in between). The prose is beautiful and recaptures the harsh nothingness of Antarctica, the paranoia of being hunted in extreme conditions, and the horror of WWI. Even though Harry is responsible for so many terrible things, I couldn’t even be angry at him because he was so broken and lost and I was actually annoyed that Jonathan didn’t see how fucking lost and broken Harry was. How he never should have brought Harry with him to the end of the world. How caught up he was in his brother’s bullshit that he couldn’t see what was right in front of him. 

There are about 24 men in the exhibition but the characters with the most development besides Jonathan and Harry are Clarke and Tarlington (who also happen to be my favorite). The rest of the characters get lost in the background and so their deaths don’t really leave an impact on the reader. Even Randall, the leader of the expedition is two-dimensional and it’s not completely clear what he’s trying to do or even thinking at times. But the Harry-Jonathan relationship and Tarlington’s struggle and strength are the core of the story. The rest of the characters are sort of there for window dressing. 

Overall this is a fantastic book and scratched my “The Thing” itch I’ve been having lately.