COMPOUND FRACTURE, accepting the gulf between what is and what could be is optional

COMPOUND FRACTURE
ANDREW JOSEPH WHITE
Peachtree Teen (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$19.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Bestselling and award-winning author Andrew Joseph White returns with a queer Appalachian thriller, that pulls no punches, for teens who see the failures in our world and are pushing for radical change.

A gut-wrenching story following a trans autistic teen who survives an attempted murder, only to be drawn into the generational struggle between the rural poor and those who exploit them.

On the night Miles Abernathy—sixteen-year-old socialist and proud West Virginian—comes out as trans to his parents, he sneaks off to a party, carrying evidence that may finally turn the tide of the blood feud plaguing Twist Creek: Photos that prove the county’s Sheriff Davies was responsible for the so-called “accident” that injured his dad, killed others, and crushed their grassroots efforts to unseat him.

The feud began a hundred years ago when Miles’s great-great-grandfather, Saint Abernathy, incited a miners’ rebellion that ended with a public execution at the hands of law enforcement. Now, Miles becomes the feud’s latest victim as the sheriff’s son and his friends sniff out the evidence, follow him through the woods, and beat him nearly to death.

In the hospital, the ghost of a soot-covered man hovers over Miles’s bedside while Sheriff Davies threatens Miles into silence. But when Miles accidentally kills one of the boys who hurt him, he learns of other folks in Twist Creek who want out from under the sheriff’s heel. To free their families from this cycle of cruelty, they’re willing to put everything on the line—is Miles?

A visceral, unabashedly political page-turner that won’t let you go until you’ve reached the end, Compound Fracture is not for the faint of heart, but it is for every reader who is ready to fight for a better world.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: If ever a book was well-placed to meet its times, it's this trans YA story of rebellion turned existential.

There are so many stories that feature parents of trans kids that reject and demean their children that it felt very warming for Miles to have befuddled, but loving and willing to learn, parents that I was ready to five-star the reading experience. Even his grandparents weren't rejecting, as so many trans kids experience. The latter were even able to see Miles' outing as the huge emotional violation it was and not blame him for the violence that followed. It was outstanding, and I really hope more trans kids than ever experience that in their lives. Sounds more and more five-starry, right?

Didn't *quite* work out that way....

That's really down to my feeling that the politics were polemical not organic to Miles. Being a socialist firebrand in West Virginia is as risky as being trans; so why was one on display, and why the political one? Given the terrible suffering Miles endures in the course of the book, why was one so impersonal the choice he's depicted as making the one he's going to suffer for? Why fuss about identity politics in the middle of class war, a character asks...I wondered why class warfare does not include bodily autonomy before a political screed.

Miles' exploration of what masculinity means in his milieu is what earned back all but a token bit of a star. This issue is absolutely wonderfully handled. Miles is a man; Miles isn't most of the stereotypically Appalachian/Southern man-coded things, eg violent and aggressive, but is figuring out what that's going to look like. His own dad's experiences in the story, as a victim of male aggression to the point of disability, seemed to me to set the stakes for Miles pretty starkly.

It ends up being a cavil in the face of the story's many strengths. I hope the whole of West Virginia will read it, if only to see what critique from a place of love for a shared home looks like. It's a home that gets huge amounts of criticism from a place of contempt heaped on it from outside.

It's good to have a corrective to the attitude but not the substance of the critics.

THE SIMPLE ART OF KILLING A WOMAN, brutally honest recounting of the reality of femicide

THE SIMPLE ART OF KILLING A WOMAN
PATRÍCIA MELO (tr. Sophie Lewis)
Restless Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From best-selling Brazilian crime novelist Patrícia Melo comes a genre-defying tale of women in the Amazon and their reckoning with brutal oppression

By turns poetic, humorous, dark, and inspiring. The Simple Art of Killing a Woman vividly conjures the epidemic of femicide in Brazil, the power women can hold in the face of overwhelming male violence, the resilience of community despite state-sponsored degradation, and the potential of the jungle to save us all.

To escape her newly aggressive lover, a young lawyer accepts an assignment in the Amazonian border town of Cruzeiro do Sul. There, she meets Carla, a local prosecutor, and Marcos, the son of an indigenous woman, and learns about the rampant attacks on the region’s women, which have grown so commonplace that the cases quickly fill her large notebook. What she finds in the jungle is not only persistent racism, patriarchy, and deforestation, but a deep longing for answers to her enigmatic past. Through the ritual use of ayahuasca, she meets a chorus of Icamiabas, warrior women bent on vengeance―and gradually, she recovers the details of her own mother’s early death.

The Simple Art of Killing a Woman resists categorization: it is a series of prose poems lamenting the real-life women murdered by so many men in Brazil; a personal search for history, truth, and belonging; and a modern, exacting, and sometimes fantastical take on very old problems that, despite our better selves, dog us the world over.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: You know a book has said something profound, moving, and honest when more about fifteen hundred Goodreads reviews are very positive to four hundred profoundly negative. Goodreads ain't the Land of Woke, yet four times as many people chose to express a positive opinion of this story of violence and murder against women as bothered to bash it.

I'm praising it, too. The way Author Melo weaves magical, intensely sensual words...

Death has been kind to me, I thought. I haven't been run over by a lorry. I haven't fallen to a stray bullet. I have not been hastened toward death—rather, death has only dreamed of me; it has only knocked at my door. Tap, tap, tap. "I'm thinking of coming for you tonight at nightfall," death had said.
–and–
It seemed to be raising a piece of me that had been forgotten, something stifled inside me, a piece that on coming free levered up another, and so on and so on, down to the last lost piece, the furthest fallen, as good as buried—the one called "mother."

...into lovely images as well as wields word-scalpels as she detachedly discusses the murder of women simply for being (or presenting as) women is brutal and effective in conveying the sickness at the heart of femicide.

You never imagine that a guy like this, a Wittgenstein reader and yoga fan, will hit you in the face at a lawyers’ New Year’s Eve party. But the statistics show that it happens a lot. And that lots of men don’t stop at a slap. They’d actually rather kill you.
–and–
The conclusion I reached by my second week in court was this: we women are dying like flies. You men get hammered and kill us. Men want to fuck and kill us. Men get enraged and kill us. Men want a bit of fun and kill us. Men discover our lovers and kill us. We leave them and men kill us. Men get another lover and kill us. Men come home tired after work and kill us.

It is as Author Melo has Carla say: "It doesn't matter where you are or what social class you belong to and it doesn't matter what you do for a living. It's dangerous being a woman."

From many directions, for reasons and for no reason at all, it is dangerous to be a woman.

That simple, statistically verifiable truth is really all the impetus I think you should need to get and read this book.

I couldn't offer a fifth star, as the subject matter alone merited, because the reading experience was not well-integrated; the tonal shifts were effective but were also overused. The characters aren't really developed because there is so very much to say about the reason we-the-reader are here; but that means, at times, we-the-reader don't get the real horror-movie-esque impact only the documentary, evidentiary disgust and outrage.

A story to admire, to absorb and retain lessons from; not one to follow your spouse or equivalent around, reading bits and snatches to.

GIVE MY LOVE TO BERLIN, a story I love but a novel I don't

GIVE MY LOVE TO BERLIN
KATHERINE BRYANT
Walrus Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$18.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: In 1927, the beautiful city of Berlin is the gay capitol of the world. Ruth, a performer at one of the nightclubs in the city, and her girlfriend, Tillie, are living their lives and enjoying the freedom of the Weimar Republic. They are surrounded by a chosen family that includes drag performers, transgender women, and the prominent physician, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld. Ruth, Tillie, and their best friends, James and Ernesto spend much of their time at the Institute for Sexual Science, the hub of the queer community in the twenties and early thirties.

As the '20s come to a close, Tillie watches her father, a prominent lawyer, as he becomes more entrenched with the Nazi Party. Working in his law office as his secretary, she meets prominent figures in the Nazi Party, including Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Göring, and becomes increasingly concerned as time passes that there is much more at stake than just her relationship with Ruth, who is also Jewish.

Tillie becomes privy to the planning of rallies, the plans the Nazi party is making in order to ensure Nazi victories in major elections, and how the Nazis are taking over Germany one neighborhood at a time. The novel jumps between the twenties and thirties and the early nineties and a young woman named Thea. Thea is dealing with the onset of her grandmother's dementia, and discovers secrets hidden away that her grandmother never intended for her to uncover.

Alternating between Tillie's perspective during the '20s and '30s as the Weimar Republic slowly gives way to a dictatorship and Thea's perspective in the '90s as the secrets of her grandmother's history come to light, Give My Love to Berlin follows the lives of two gay couples—Tillie and Ruth, and their best friends, James and Ernesto—trying to navigate falling in love, thriving in their community, and coming to terms with the danger they are in just by being who they are.

The author wrote this book for several reasons, mainly because she had never heard of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, or his work and she did not know that Berlin had been such a huge part of gay culture. After the 2016 election, the author could see parallels between the vitriol for the queer community in many parts of the United States and the way queer people were being treated as the Nazis gained power, particularly in Berlin. Now, with all the anti-drag and anti-transgender legislation, it is more important than ever to tell these stories so we can keep them from repeating in the future.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The reviews of this book on Goodreads are very divided. Many apparently Jewish reviewers seem to take exception to the author's inclusion of queer people as victims of the Holocaust. Many others seem to dislike the wooden prose. I'm in the latter camp. (Pardon the wordplay.)

It's a great idea for a book, one that would've come across better had it felt less like research notes made to fit...poorly...around fictional standards. It's not clear to me that all the plot points were thought through...why would a woman working for literal Nazis ever question a trans person feeling threatened anywhere at all?...so I was left with the idea that this story seized the author's imagination but didn't get the mulling time, or followed editorial guidance, to smooth some of the burrs on its edge.

I was utterly repelled by the amount of sexual violence, as I know I was expected to be; the response to it from every character seemed...off. One does not just seamlessly drop the horror of sexual violence. It's ordinary to mask the trauma as a survival mechanism, but this felt more like just being okay with it. Again, I think this is more about the author not taking enough time to think these issues through, or not having (or heeding) editorial feedback.

If the author ever revisits the story with a strong editorial eye, this could be a good, interesting, involving novel. As it is, this is not a great read. I'm disappointed and saddened to say it.

DISAPPOINT ME, easily the title most easily misunderstood for #PrideMonth

DISAPPOINT ME
NICOLA DINAN
The Dial Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An electrifying story of love, betrayal, and the complicated allure of bougie domesticity.

You can fall in love with an outline, you can even make a home with one, but there will come a time where you can’t deny the bones their flesh. A person is no fewer than two things.

Thirty years old with a lifetime of dysphoria and irritating exes rattling around in her head, Max is plagued by a deep dissatisfaction. Shouldn’t these be the best years of her life? Why doesn’t it feel that way? After taking a spill down the stairs at a New Year’s Eve party, she decides to make some changes. First: a stab at good old-fashioned heteronormativity.

Max thinks she’s found the answer in Vincent. While his corporate colleagues, trad friends, and Chinese parents never pictured their son dating a trans woman, he cares for Max in a way she’d always dismissed as a foolish fantasy. But he is also carrying baggage of his own. When the fall-out of a decades-old entanglement resurfaces, Max must decide what forgiveness really means. Can we be more than our worst mistakes? Is it possible to make peace with the past?

Funny, sharp, and poignant, Disappoint Me is a sweeping exploration of love, loss, trans panic, race, millennial angst, and the relationships—familial and romantic—that make us who we are.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Is it possible to love someone after you know their worst moments? Is it possible to love someone when you don't know their worst moments?

That's an existential question, applying to each and all of us. It's one to ask yourself when thinking about any relationship, including your relationship with yourself. Max is doing a lot of thinking about relationships to self, and to Truth, and to facts...and Vincent. She's been blindsided in her complex developing relationship to him. Add to this a quite conservative Chinese family (pretty much a trope heading into stereotype-dom at this point) that's honestly struggling (I mean struggling, and being honest about it) with her transfem identity, and to the past actions Vincent undertook that form a separate narrative strand.

When Max decides she is going to pursue a heteronormative identity, it came after a crisis in her life. This makes it feel a bit forced. If this had been something Max was mulling over, I'd've found its narrative suddenness a bit less jarring. That said, I'm actually kind of relieved not to have the narrative focus on Max's transition...it's happened, it's done, what's next? Vincent being okay with her transness was, dare I say it, a bit less startling than I was perhaps expected to find it. Until, that is, we move into a timeline of Vincent's past and discover what Max now learns; this event is going to change everything in the present as it did in the past.

What matters in all these deftly plucked strands of Author Dinan's story-web is the essential unknowability of one's emotional life once given into the hands of another. What we feel for the other, what is felt by the other, how all that will intertwine to make the web that couplehood sticks us to, what new information—truth, fact, realty—means in that web is where we're meant to focus. At times the quotidian world intrudes and distracts, or is allowed to intrude and distract. The attentive reader will notice register shifts in Author Dinan's prose from pleasantly descriptive to nearly florid at those moments. I'm assuming food is a comfort drug to Max and her found family....

Where do we end up in this web? In it. I read the book assuming I'd reach a conclusion to some of those issues raised above. I do not think quite a few people will find the openness of the ending, the real lack of closure for Max and, to a lesser degree of investment, Vincent, to be satisfying. I took a star off because I was not given a sense that, by the end, Max had any kind or sort of response, still less plan, to all she's learned. We simply...leave the story, trailing web-strands of it behind us.


Not a perfect read, then, but one I very much enjoyed. More from you soon, please, Author Dinan!

RESERVOIR BITCHES: Stories, outrage...rage...there's more in here than meets the eye

RESERVOIR BITCHES: Stories
DAHLIA DE LA CERDA (tr. Julia Sanches & Heather Cleary)
The Feminist Press at CUNY
$16.95 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: LONGLISTED for the 2025 International Booker Prize

A debut collection of gritty, streetwise, and wickedly funny stories about Mexican women who fight, skirt, cheat, cry, kill, and lie their way to survival.

“Life’s a bitch. That’s why you gotta rattle her cage, even if she’s foaming at the mouth.” In the linked stories of Reservoir Bitches, thirteen Mexican women prod the bitch that is Life and become her. From the all-powerful daughter of a cartel boss to the victim of transfemicide, from a houseful of spinster seamstresses to a socialite who supports her politician husband by faking Indigenous roots, these women spit on their own reduction and invent new ways to endure, telling their own stories in bold, unapologetic voices. At once a work of black humor and social critique, Reservoir Bitches is a raucous debut from one of Mexico’s most thrilling new writers.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: If and/or when (honestly I'm all but certain it won't happen) the mooted TV series, via Amazon Prime and Spanish-language producers Perro Azul, arrives I will be *amazed* if even a third of rage and fury in these stories make it onto the screen. Since the Feminist Press mentioned this possibility when the book was first published in September 2024, nothing else has appeared on Amazon, The Hollywood Reporter, or even Perro Azul's Spanish-language websites. I expect it's a dead deal...given the truly hair-raising stuff in here, I'd be far more surprised if any production efforts were ever made. This is strong stuff. The *men* in charge of any budgets will not approve this one!

As is reasonable and customary in these parts, these thirteen stories will be dealt with by using the time-honored Bryce Method.

Parsley and Coca Cola details an at-home self-induced effort at aborting an unwanted child..."Yup, I got knocked up by a terrible lay," she says directly to us, recounting this latest blow from Clotho's shuttle as her life of bad luck...no visible dad, dead mom, now this...takes its own ugly pattern. A lucky break...an older woman who clearly knows the score...means a day or so of nasty pain, some passing of clots, and finally confirmed success.

Not for the squeamish, but I can vouch for its accuracy. 4*

Yuliana brutalizes our eyes with the inner monologue of a drug capo's heiress, the toughest of his children. "We women always speak, think, and act from the memory of our pain," she says to us as she recounts her revenge on the man who killed her high-school bestie via her new, um, protegée's well-honed skills as an angel of vengeance against men who abuse women.

The female of the species, fam. 4.5*

God Forgive Us, a cri de cœur, emitted by an old mestiza spinster who's spent her whole life caring for...and about...her duty, her reputation, after she and another sister murder a girl.

The girl was a machete-wielding robber, so it was self-defense. No legal problems ensue. But how terrible her guilt, how bitter the social dregs! She killed a girl! Because she and her sister thought the violent invader of their home was a boy.

But it was a girl! Her poor mother! 4*

Constanza proves that, when you have no center, nothing is ever going to hold you back. Unsettling. I felt...outrage, anger, contempt, quietly and at myself for how easily I saw her point and how terribly easily snuffing out a life could become a routine matter. It was a wake-up call for the snotty little moralizer inside to see the emotional rightness of tit-for-tat. 4 unsettled stars, and an extra session in therapy requested

God Didn't Come Through like she ever does, mijo. This is the other side of "God Forgive Us," in case you want to practice your lip-pursing action. First mention in the collection, to my surprise, of Santa Muerte...and I now twig to the fact I haven't mentioned the untranslated Spanish yet!

Words here and there are dropped without full context but with plenty of cues, so you're never left at sea. Offshore in a sturdy dinghy, yes; but always in sight of the land that meaning provides. 4.5*

La China takes us inside "Yuliana"'s murder plans, and an account of the action that, while revolting, was not prurient or distastefully lingering.

I'm a little unnerved that it's so easy to put myself into the headspace of these outsiders, to see there's a real "why" behind the awful whats they're doing. I'll need another extra therapy session soon. 4*

The Rose of Sharon is so short it barely counts a percentage point in the read. It is every goddamned thing I despise about religion in one caustic, awful vignette. I still see its vileness in front of my eyes...

Vomit trickled from his mouth, smelling of liquor. I dropped to the floor with tears in my eyes and prayed he would choke. "Dear Lord, let the walls of Jericho fall before my eyes, throw off my shackles and drag this man to the gates of Hell. Give me victory over my enemy, knock down the walls of my prison and the fortresses that cast down my heart."

So very godly, no?

This is not the end, or the ending. Suffice to say myths enacted are always enacted for evil. 4*

Regina is the deets behind "Yuliana"'s inciting incident. Not memorable, feels...hmmm...like a makeweight, a tossed-on bread roll to get the scale where it needs to be.

Plus, it's ever-so precious. 3*

Mariposa de Barrio is what happens when life's a lemon grove, the lemonade's for the owner, all you're gonna get is the empty, fleshless rinds...boil up some sugar and candy that peel, mija! Never mind how much it costs. Bills can get paid all kinda ways, but all of 'em Later. 3.5*

The Smile makes the femicides on La Frontera deeply personal. Somehow even the appalling facts do not feel prurient, since they're not lingered over; I like to think this actually happened, the ending I mean, at least once. 4*

Sequins "Masculinity is like marzipan: fragile as hell, queen," says our transfem narrator. Let me tell you, seeing that observation in a defector from The Boys was a bitch-slap like no other. Then, the price for laughter: murder, femicide again, only this time the details are there. It's brutal to read but what human could do that, all that, to a living person?

An evil one, the evil ones are the killers not ever their victims. Blood does wash away "sins"—the victim's. 4.5*

Playing with Fire is the funniest story here, among some weirdly funny, but not nice, stuff. This one is rip-your-shorts laughing fun.

Professional courtesy is not just between lawyers. 5*

La Huesera, last in line, is more novelette than story.

Fucking brutal. Horrifying. Enraging. La Huesera adressed de profundis:

Even if only part of your ashes...are under my bed, the way I see it, your bones have been gathered. I hope someday I'll get to hear you howling in the night.

Saving the best for last, Author de la Cerda. 5*

MEDUSA OF THE ROSES, we have a literary heir to Jean Genet at last

MEDUSA OF THE ROSES
NAVID SINAKI
Grove Press
$27.00 hardcover, available tomorrow

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Sex, vengeance, and betrayal in modern day Tehran—Navid Sinaki’s bold and cinematic debut is a queer literary noir following Anjir, a morbid romantic and petty thief whose boyfriend disappears just as they’re planning to leave their hometown for good

Anjir and Zal are childhood best friends turned adults in love. The only problem is they live in Iran, where being openly gay is criminalized, and the government’s apparent acceptance of trans people requires them to surgically transition and pass as cis straight people. When Zal is brutally attacked after being seen with another man in public, despite the betrayal, Anjir becomes even more determined to carry out their longstanding plan for the future: Anjir, who’s always identified with the mythical gender-changing Tiresias, will become a woman, and they’ll move to a new town for a fresh start as husband and wife.

Then Zal vanishes, leaving a cryptic note behind that sets Anjir on a quest to find the other man, hoping he will lead to Zal. Stalking and stealing his way through the streets, clubs, library stacks, hotel rooms, and museum halls of Tehran—where he encounters his troubled mother, addict brother, and the dynamic Leyli, a new friend who is undergoing a transition of her own—Anjir soon realizes that someone is tailing him too. It quickly becomes clear that more violence may be the fastest route to freedom, as Anjir’s morals and gender identity are pushed to new places in the pursuit of love, peace, and self-determination.

Steeped in ancient Persian and Greek myths, and brimming with poetic vulnerability, subversive bite, and noirish grit, Medusa of the Roses is a page-turning wallop of a story from a bright new literary talent.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I think most of us love the honorable thief in fiction. Stories abound over the generations that feature a good person forced to steal by an unjust system, by a pressing external need, or just to redress the wild imbalance of power over one's person. Robin Hood, Locke Lamora, Aladdin, and their literary kin are enshrined in the cultural conversation. Mythology's trickster gods, those agents of chaos, are...witness Loki as embodied by Tom Hiddleston here and now...endlessly popular because no one doesn't love a funny, witty piss-take.

Then there's Jean Genet. DEFINITELY not a comfortably admirable character to most people, a petty thief and prostitute whose actions as a very incompetent thief (he kept getting caught!) earned him the 1940s French version of a three-strikes law conviction. No one ever tried to pretend he was in the Resistance. Who cared what language the jailers spoke? He stole and sold his body because he didn't like the other options...wholly self-motivated, probably a narcissist, but magnetically interesting and embodying anti-establishment Cool.

Now, after years of disuse, we have Anjir from that mold. He and his love Zal must be together. Funds for transitioning to female aren't coming from the government that demands he take this step...which, to be fair, isn't one he resists...so he steals.

Living in theocratic Iran is awful enough for AFAB women.Think how much more horrifying it would be to be an AMAB man-loving man who, deliberately and consistently, acts "like a woman"...has sex with and enters into romanitic partnerships with men. A complete affront to Male Privilege! An assault on God's Will! God put men on top! DON'T BOTTOM!! Or, if you really must, then transition to female.

I totally support trans rights. I am not in any way trans, have no desire to be female, dislike pretty intensely my culture's hideous fun-house mirror idea of "femininity" and would strongly prefer to be dead rather than forced to conform to what I see as a ghastly disfiguring joke of an identity. Yet, if gay men want to live and love their partnered lives, that is what their theocratic government tells them to do.

I live in fear of the US right-wingnuts figuring out their transphobia can be redeployed.

What I enjoyed about my ride through modern Iran was the sense I got of a society on the boil. Stuff is happening in this book, stuff that's out of most people's sight, but is building up pressure and will blow a hole in the status quo. The author has crafted an avatar of selfish anti-social action who represents, just by his existence, Resistance!

Told in beautiful sentences, this story of Love, Passion, and Honesty draws on millennia of models for its men's identities. It is a read I won't soon forget or easily allow to slip under the newer reads to come.

CANTO CONTIGO, music-world YA with trans rep...brush up on your Spanish at the same time

CANTO CONTIGO
JONNY GARZA VILLA
Wednesday Books
$20.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: When a Mariachi star transfers schools, he expects to be handed his new group's lead vocalist spot—what he gets instead is a tenacious current lead with a very familiar, very kissable face.

In a twenty-four-hour span, Rafael Alvarez led North Amistad High School’s Mariachi Alma de la Frontera to their eleventh consecutive first-place win in the Mariachi Extravaganza de Nacional; and met, made out with, and almost hooked up with one of the cutest guys he’s ever met.

Now eight months later, Rafie’s ready for one final win. What he didn’t plan for is his family moving to San Antonio before his senior year, forcing him to leave behind his group while dealing with the loss of the most important person in his life—his beloved abuelo. Another hitch in his plan: The Selena Quintanilla-Perez Academy’s Mariachi Todos Colores already has a lead vocalist, Rey Chavez—the boy Rafie made out with—who now stands between him winning and being the great Mariachi Rafie's abuelo always believed him to be. Despite their newfound rivalry for center stage, Rafie can’t squash his feelings for Rey. Now he must decide between the people he’s known his entire life or the one just starting to get to know the real him.

Canto Contigo is a love letter to Mexican culture, family and legacy, the people who shape us, and allowing ourselves to forge our own path. At its heart, this is one of the most glorious rivals-to-lovers romance about finding the one who challenges you in the most extraordinary ways.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: People are complicated, messy creatures, amalgamated from every speck of the spectrum of existence. No one who thinks babyqueers, that is your adolescent persons of all genders and preferences, should be kept in the dark about this, has any moral authority. They're arguing for repressions that they screech loudly about perceiving against them, but it being okay to do to others because they're Other.

The centrality of "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you" is obviously lost on these idiots.

Now that's out of the way, Canto Contigo (that title rips my sentimental heart out) is the 180° opposite of the book-banner/oppressor mentality's comfort zone. There's an out trans person in a gay relationship! That ought to send some fur flying among the deeply homophobic Latine folks, the religious nuts, and the fascist identity police. Good job, Author Garza Villa. Keep swingin' for their kneecaps. That goes also for Rafie's overweening Man-itude. The sheer arrogance of all adolescents I have ever met too often gets left out of the mirror of YA fiction. There is not a male person alive in the world today who could not benefit from seeing how his Man-itude looks from the outside. Start early instilling awareness and perspective in your boys, gay or otherwise. It will help him, and all who love him, in the long run.

The grieving that Rafie does for his Abuelo is very well-handled, and makes Rafie's dickheadedness a lot more forgiveable. It's a big refreshing change to see boys being credited with the ability to process deep emotions, albeit not smoothly. Too often the resolution of the grieving is both too smooth and too fast. Rafie's grieving isn't complete by the end of the story but it's underway...much more honest, IMO. I'll alsi let Anglophone readers know that there's a goodly amount of Spanish used in the dialogue. As that's normal for Mexican-American boys, I didn't actually notice it much until I was asked to translate something. So, be aware if speaking Spanish is not on your list of accomplishments.

The vibrancy of these boys rushing into their lives, hurtling past the idiocy of phobes and their control fetishes, their smallness of spirit, and the rules they insist must be obeyed, was delightful. The music lessons are fascinating. The fact that the boys are rivals for a very important and prestigious position in their school's mariachi contest is a great way to keep the emotional loud pedal down without it feeling as though the author's manufacturing crises. It's baked in when the situation is set up this way. Going for the same role in a public-facing event is going to make competitors out of any two boys, then add to the mix that Rey's got the added pressure of representing for all of transmasc-dom.... They're believably entwined, they're completely besotted, and they each want to win.

Great way to tell a story. It's told well. I'm glad I got to know the entire bunch. Yes, even the jerks...need jerks to make a love story about us-v-them really work. This one's got that covered. I might think twice about handing the book to anyone fourteen or under without really carefully considering where that kid's social development was. Fifteen on up I'd be completely comfortable handing it over.

Get one for yourself, too, grandparent, and have a book club.

THESE FRAGILE GRACES, THIS FUGITIVE HEART, hypercapitalist hellscape meets trans Terminator

THESE FRAGILE GRACES, THIS FUGITIVE HEART
IZZY WASSERSTEIN
Tachyon Publications
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In a queer, noir technothriller of fractured identity and corporate intrigue, a trans woman faces her fear of losing her community as her past chases after her. This bold, thought-provoking debut science-fiction novella from a Lambda Award finalist is an exciting and unpredictable look at the fluid nature of our former and present selves.

In mid-21st-century Kansas City, Dora hasn’t been back to her old commune in years. But when Dora’s ex-girlfriend Kay is killed, and everyone at the commune is a potential suspect, Dora knows she’s the only person who can solve the murder.

As Dora is dragged back into her old community and begins her investigations, she discovers that Kay’s death is only one of several terrible incidents. A strange new drug is circulating. People are disappearing. And Dora is being attacked by assailants from her pre-transition past.

Meanwhile, it seems like a war between two nefarious corporations is looming, and Dora’s old neighborhood is their battleground. Now she must uncover a twisted conspiracy, all while navigating a deeply meaningful new relationship.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: There are some tropes in the noir genre I love more than others. One is the private dick with a complicated love history. Rick and Elsa in Casablanca. Marlowe and Ruth in The Maltese Falcon. Jake and Evelyn (and her daddy) in Chinatown. Walter Neff and Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity.Not one tiny shred of honest, forthright communication and commitment to any relationship's future in the lot. This being my deeply cynical belief about the reality of all marriages' basis and fates, I thought I'd got a solid bead on the way the genre will work on this topic.

Laddies and gentlewomen, Izzy Wasserstein blew the (closet) doors off this one.

Dora, our protagonist, lives in a deeply dysfunctional dystopian near-future (a couple decades) post-apocalyptic USA. We don't explore the apocalypse much, just live day-to-day with Dora...Theodora, né Theodore...as she tries to survive in the wreckage of hypercapitalism. She (chosen pronoun) spent years in a hardscrabble anarchist commune with her pretransition Theodore-self's lover and commune co-founder, Kay. The pair split up, and Dora left the commune, over Kay and the others' rejection of her desire to tighten the commune's security about new members and the commune's handling of data. The others felt it was not in the spirit of the effort to be so closed and paranoid; she did. So she closed the door behind her on the way out. Maybe slammed is fairer; maybe slammed the damn door so hard it splintered, even.

And now Dora has to return to the commune, using all her skills acquired while she was Theodore, to solve the murder of Kay. Why was Kay murdered? What did Dora tell the communards about security? Is this thing on? So begins a fast-lane tour of the hellscape that is Kansas City in this deeply divided world, as Dora ferrets out facts and confronts Big Bads. Naturally, there are ties in the story Dora unfolds to the Theodore past...and, not coincidentally, Dora is confronted with the cruelest, most cinema-friendly enemies imaginable: clones of Theodore.

This, then, is the heart of the story. The world, and the world-building, are not deep because you're not here for the wrapping paper but for the gift. Dora has to battle Theodore-faced enemies bound and determined to kill her! Can there be anything more visually appealing than that?! Can the cruelty of deadnaming be more bluntly portrayed?

I really doubt it can. The setup, the story, the world...all part of the point of the read: Identity, its power, its costs, and the sheer nightmarish house of mirrors the trans person must live with, and through, simply to claim what cisgender people walk around blissfully unaware that they possess.

Themselves. Their unquestioned selfhood, unimpacted by the feelings, opinions, judgments of others, unquestioned by the self-appointed guardians of...you know, I just don't know what they are guarding. No one's attacking my maleness by being transmasc or transfem. What needs guarding about that? Anyway, I exist in a bubble of privileges of many sorts, and reading books like this that take me into the unprivileged side of my life do me a gigantic service. Perspective is something I treasure, even when I don't unreservedly enjoy getting it.

I did not read the book with unalloyed pleasure. There'd be a fifth star on my rating had that been the case. I enjoyed the pace; the author starts fast and doesn't slow down. I enjoyed the message; see above. I was squirmy about the echoes of The Man Who Folded Himself. That wasn't unnecessary; but I had to read the author's Afterword to get why it was not gratuitous. I was a bit unconvinced by the Big Bad's motivation. Not eyerollingly so, but in that niggly little itch that says, "really? all this because of that?"

I default back to, readers aren't here for just one experience, just one focus, a single reward for their time spent in Dora's world. It's just a thing I felt vaguely unsatisfied by, and should try to explain to others in advance of their reads.

I think Author Izzy deserves your afternoon and evening to get this involving story into you. I'm glad it's in me now.

New Review Extra for 19 April 2013: KILLED AT THE WHIM OF A HAT (Jimm Juree #1)

KILLED AT THE WHIM OF A HAT (Jimm Juree #1)
COLIN COTTERILL
Minotaur Books
$2.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A former crime reporter stuck in rural Thailand discovers a grizzly cold case in this "ebullient series kickoff" by the author of The Coroner's Lunch (Kirkus).

A former crime reporter with the Chiang Mai Daily Mail, Jimm Juree has moved with her eccentric family to a small fishing village on the Gulf of Siam. Stuck in this provincial backwater, she's convinced her days as a journalist are over—until a local palm oil farmer uncovers a long-buried Volkswagen on his property.

Two human skeletons, one wearing a hat, are found inside the van. Jimm is thrilled. Then a Buddhist monk is murdered at a nearby temple, and she finds herself facing a baffling and dangerous mystery. There are no suspects and no apparent motive—but plenty of odd connections to other brutal killings.

Suddenly, Jimm's new life is somewhat more promising and a lot more deadly. To unravel these inexplicable events, she'll need all of her skills, a lot of luck, and the help of her entire family.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA LibraryThing Early Reviewers.

My Review: Jimm Juree, female crime reporter/editrix in waiting, leaves heavily urban and crime-ridden Chiang Mai, Thailand (ideal for her chosen trade, eh?), when her scatty, pre-dementia-sufferer mother (called "Mair" which means Mama throughout the book) decides to sell the family home and family shop and buy a ghastly little hole-in-the-wall "resort" in Thailand's Deep South...with all the freight that phrase implies in English fully intact here. With Mair and Jimm go Arny, the youngest of the family, a cliff of muscle and a mass of insecurities, as well as Granddad Jah, father of Mair and forty-year veteran of the Thai police whose inability to take bribes stalled his career at the level of Corporal.

Gettin' the set-up here? Mass of misfits go to be, collectively, fish out of water on the hot, humid Gulf of Siam coast. And what happens? As soon as the family gets there, Jimm gets involved in a weird discovery: Two skeletons in an ancient VW Kombi discovered at the bottom of a well-pit. What gives? We follow Jimm as she makes friends (sort of) with the local constabulary in pursuit of information on the who, what, when, how, and why of this utterly strange killing...murder...accidental death...suicide...? Who knows? But the editor Jimm so wanted to replace as soon as he dies buys the story.

Yay, right? Well...then comes a grisly horrible scary murder of an abbot sent from Buddhist HQ to investigate the possible salacious goins-on of the local abbot and his resident nun. Turns out they knew each other well in former lives...and someone is sure they're doin' the nasty even now, many many years later. When the HQ abbot turns up hideously slain, there is a curious radio silence...no news leaks...but Jimm, being steps away from the crime scene, hears all and sees much. She, with help from flaming queen Lieutenant Chompu, Granddad Jah, and a selection of interviewees at varying levels of helpfulness and relevance, puts all the pieces together. The guilty are, well, guilty, and known to be so; the ending is a bit of a let-down on some points. But end it does, and no one can not know justice is meant to be served.
This book and I have A History. The first copy I got was *shudder* bug-infested *shudder*, and was summarily heaved into the trash for the crime. Then a dear and warm-hearted fellow reader took pity on me and sent me her copy of the ARC. Now how kind is that? And when does the book arrive? Just as I'm beginning a nasty nasty bout of flu. So was I willing to cut the beginning of the book, which contains some unpleasant slights to the transgendered community, any slack? Why no! I was not! And then we are treated to some snark, a little sarcasm, and heaps of condescenscion. Oh, my, were we on the way to a flame-fest! I had my own vituperative darts and righteous flaming arrows all lined up, I did. I was even ready to give up and just not review it, since I hate to be nasty to authors who have spent blood, sweat, and tears on creating something to amuse thee and me. Seems churlish somehow.

Then came p349. I won't tell you what happens there. Suffice to know that the whole reason I was reading the book, ill temper and all, snapped into focus for me. I was left a little hollow by that stuffing-knocking-out. I was so very glad I'd kept going. It made a lot of things that ticked me off fall into perspective. It could for you, too...but, in the end, it's the characters that will make or break this book for readers, not necessarily the mystery. In this way, the book merits comparison to Mma Ramotswe's adventures retailed by Alexander McCall Smith. The setting of rural Thailand is certainly fresh and new to my jaded American eyes!

So. To recommend or not to recommend? I choose recommend, with one strong caveat: Open up *first* or the experience of change might slip past you. I'd hate to know that was the case.