BELLIES, Author Nicola Dinan's Polari-Prize winning first novel

BELLIES
NICOLA DINAN
Hanover Square Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$20.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

WINNER of the 2024 Polari First Book Prize

The Publisher Says: I wore a dress on the night I first met Ming.

It begins as your typical boy meets boy. While out with friends at their local university drag night, Tom buys Ming a drink. Confident and witty, a magnetic young playwright, Ming is the perfect antidote to Tom’s awkward energy, and their connection is instant. Tom finds himself deeply and desperately drawn into Ming’s orbit, and on the cusp of graduation, he’s already mapped out their future together. But shortly after they move to London to start their next chapter, Ming announces her intention to transition.

From London to Kuala Lumpur, New York to Cologne, we follow Tom and Ming as they face tectonic shifts in their relationship and friend circle in the wake of Ming’s transition. Through a spiral of unforeseen crises—some personal, some professional, some life-altering—Tom and Ming are forced to confront the vastly different shapes their lives have taken since graduating, and each must answer the essential question: Is it worth losing a part of yourself to become who you are?

Buoyed by a voice as tender, effervescent and wryly funny as the cast of characters it centers, Bellies is an unforgettable story of youth, intimacy, hunger and heartbreak, at once boldly original yet fiercely familiar, which unabashedly holds a mirror up to our most vulnerable selves and desires.

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

My Review: The depth of my youthful ignorance was forcefully recalled to me as I read this novel. I knew a transfem lady in my youth. I was utterly rejecting and actively unpleasant to her, a thing that recalling in my elderqueer years I view with horror at my cruelty.

If she is still alive (not a given for QUILTBAG people my age), I hope it is a life accompanied by a circle of people knowing her, giving her the fullest experience of being loved, accepted, and celebrated for being herself. It shames me what I thought, felt, and—mortifyingly—said to her when she came out to me. Living well is the best revenge. I hope she has had her revenge on me in spades these past five decades. My own trans family and friends have reason to thank her for bringing my unreasoning prejudice to the forefront to be confronted.

I came to this story, then, predisposed to find in it a measure of redemption. Not mine, but Ming's as she comes to realize transitioning is her only path forward to a fulfilling life..."I feel like I’ve been drawing an outline of myself using negative space"...while knowing it means literally never going back to her birth family; and Tom's, as he comes into contact with an entirely new spectrum of identities just as being gay is really settling in as his honest identity. His gayness, kindness (edging into codependence), and almost desperate desire to help are deeply familiar to me. "I have a bad habit of going along with things that aren't right for me, and I'm just trying to do the things a person would do if they loved themselves as much as they loved other people." So relatable!

Much as in Disappoint Me (q.v.), the heaviest desriptive lifting is being done in service of food. Like that book, it's always true that food descriptions are in a heightened register. Do not read this book while hungry. If you're wise, only do so after your favorite stick-to-your-ribs meal is on board and you have something dessertable on hand.

Like any story about being a young adult, still less one who is transitioning and one who is in love with someone making the transition, there are a lot of operatically heightened emotions flowing around. The friend group Ming and Tom create all have drama, upsets, ideas and opinions of Ming of Tom of Life...you remember. It's a messy, intense time. It's the meatiest chunk of a life well-lived, and these young folk are living it! I confess to feeling worn out by the intensity of it: "I'd spent years feeling happy to be nourished by Ming's light, so much so that I'd never asked what I could be for myself, only what I could be for her. I'd long suspected that Ming shone brighter than me, the same way I'd suspected Sarah {the girl he left for Ming} did, too". I suspect I supplied the intensity as Author Dinan reserves her descriptive riches more for food.

A beautiful, passionate evocation of one's early adulthood, replete with relatable drama, unimaginably brave and accepting people bound tighter than they ever will be again, and the most wonderful thing of all: Discovering Love.

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!