MAD EDEN: A Novel, long may Morgan Thomas create characters to enrich our imaginations

MAD EDEN: A Novel
MORGAN THOMAS
MCD x FSG (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From a pathbreaking writer, a thrilling, form-bending novel about a trans healthcare worker whose carefully built life is suddenly imperiled.

Ro and Liam live in a ramshackle cabin in a secluded stretch of Florida. Neither their home nor their sometimes-tumultuous relationship is what the world would call perfect, but to Ro—newly diagnosed with autism and working as a patient navigator for people seeking gender-affirming care—their life, despite the deeply inhospitable political climate, is a kind of paradise.

It's hard to pinpoint exactly what shatters their peace. There’s Quentin, the unpredictable teenager for whom Liam and Ro are quasi-parents, who visits on his way to college, where he plans to finally start T. There’s the appearance of “Mad Eden,” an online fantasy serial about heroic dragon riders that increasingly becomes Ro’s obsession. And then there’s a seemingly innocuous patient video call that results in consequences both unexpected and grave. This triad of circumstances sends Liam's and Ro’s world spinning toward disaster—unless Ro can become the real-life hero their situation demands without betraying who they are and who they love.

With colossal heart and preternatural skill, Morgan Thomas crafts a deliciously destabilizing debut novel that challenges us to confront and reinvent questions of language, sex, prejudice, identity, and the shifting scales of morality. Playing with the possible relationship between autism and time to forge an ingenious new kind of storytelling, Mad Eden imagines, with exhilarating courage, how we might yet joyfully live in a precarious world.

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My Review: "Intersectionality" is a buzzword, it's true; the idea behind a person having intersecting identities has always seemed self-evident to me, so I'm been a bit eye-rolly in my response to its polysyllabifactive neologization.

Whatever, old man, what's your point?

The intersectionality of Ro's adult-diagnosed autism and Ro's trans identity would never have been used in a mainstream, high-budget novel in my youth. It would have lurked in the bottom-of-the-midlist pity-porn area of publishing throughout the entirety of the twentieth century. (Leave aside autism's hideous, abusive history for now, it's not relevant in this context. Let's just be delighted that it is not the case anymore.)

And Author Thomas would have been deprived of their métier. To all our great loss. (Singular "they" is neither error nor solecism.) To make this exploration of human...grunginess, messiness, animal-function reality...there had to be a generation of writers pushing pushing pushing against the polite prudery of nice people who act like they've never smelled, let alone touched, an asshole. If you've changed a diaper, cleaned yourself after a shit, cleaned up after your pet, yes you have. Many a nose is wrinkling now. Maybe this read is not for you, because it's very forthright in its body-ness. I think all y'all ought to unpucker and stop with the fakeness of pretending you're shocked, shocked! to find there's animal reality to beings living their life.

I suspect it will cause some people to re-evaluate their transphobia, however minld it may be, to realize that it's rooted in a concept of body-ness that belongs to a bygone era. Much like "eww-ick" homophobia, the reality of the twenty-first century is we can fix/clean/care for many, many things that killed people in older times. Keep up! Plug in! Grow some empathy for others' needs and wants, if you expect to go unchallenged in your perception of yourself as a good person.

Ro, the autistic trans guide through the deliberately desgined to be complex medical system that enriches many corporations and immiserates and impoverishes millions who live in the US, uses their autism to guide those in need through a labyrinth. Think, in this case, of the original Labyrinth and its intended function: a prison to hold a monstrous being created out of mismatched partners' uncontrollable, animal (!) passion. Is this making sense now? Ro is less Theseus, more Ariadne. A humane person, one caring for the welfare of others, helping them finr ways through the unforgiving maze, not always a "monster"-slaying self-righteous prick.

I don't offer a perfect five stars because I was less convinced by the "Mad Eden" text that Ro becomes obsessed with being all that worthy of their obsession. I was also more interested in leaning more about Ro, their partner Liam, and the couple's found-family child Quentin in relationship than I was in "Mad Eden." So, purely on personal-enjoyment grounds, I've got to go with a solid four-and-a-half stars for this rich, enriching, selfness-nourishing tale of one person's choice to use their lifee to help others find their own true selves.

IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS, a chilling title that blooms as you read its story

IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS
ADA HOFFMANN
Tachyon Publications (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.95 paperback

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A script supervisor for an AI media conglomerate is caught between her intense need for an orderly life and her deeper, darker queer desires. From the creator of the Outside trilogy, a heartfelt interplanetary epic of identity, longing, and a space pirate who smuggles inappropriate stories.

Kelli Reynolds loves creating stories more than anything in the world. But on Callisto, a generative AI company called Inspiration owns everything, including all the media, and only Inspiration determines which stories can be told.

Kelli has a rare and coveted job in which her autism is to her advantage: She precisely edits AI output into “appropriate” stories for Inspiration’s massive TV audience. Her proudest creation is the pirate Orlando—a dashing do-gooder based on stories she used to tell friends.

Reenter Kelli’s ex-boyfriend Rowan, the person Kelli based Orlando on. Back when they were teenagers, their relationship was a secret. Kelli had thought that Rowan, a trans man, was her schoolmate Em, a girl.

Rowan is tangled up in the black market after he needed to get money for gender reassignment surgery. He needs Kelli’s help with something . . . illegal. So, now Kelli has to decide: Will she risk the safe, tidy story of her life now for the world she once wished for? What would Orlando do?

Passionate, dangerous, and tender, Ignore All Previous Instructions is a sweeping, poignant novel about censorship, forbidden love, and growing up.

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My Review: When one entity controls the entirety of a resource, controls all access to that resource, and the resource in question is valued highly by enough people, you have the makings of a great story. Food...oil...microchips...stories, doesn't much matter what it is, if there's a control of access you're looking at an inevitable reckoning for the controllers. They will do literally any- and every-thing to keep you, the dupe, hooked on whatever it is; they will cause hideous suffering and death just to keep their power and privilege.

Is this ringing any bells? Anything at all coming to mind?

That's the story Author Hoffmann is telling us. If that story is not to your liking, this is not the read for you.

The execution of the basic story is good. It offers the Resistance becoming an outright rebellion; it uses the characters' genuine, relatable emotional realities to deepen our readerly investment in the events. I was deeply invested in Rowan's multiple axes of rebellion, personal and moral; I found Kelli's deeply personal path through coming to awareness of the wrongs being done to her and to everyone else very convincingly limned by a very talented wordcraftworker.

Why I don't offer a perfect five is Rowan's direct PoV being limited to flashbacks. I found that jarring, when we have Kelli as the direct PoV in past and present. I looked for a structural reason that needed to be the way we were getting the story, but couldn't find one. Kelli's job as a script supervisor, with high-masking autism-spectrum disorder, is very very well used to set stakes believably. Her borning realization of the evil she participates in is *chef's kiss*.

Highly recommended for culture warriors most of all!

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.

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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.

YOU WEREN'T MEANT TO BE HUMAN, if the title chills you wait'll you read the story

YOU WEREN'T MEANT TO BE HUMAN
ANDREW JOSEPH WHITE
Saga Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

One of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of 2025!

The Publisher Says: Alien meets Midsommar in this chilling debut adult novel from award-winning author Andrew Joseph White about identity, survival, and transformation amidst an alien invasion in rural West Virginia.

Festering masses of worms and flies have taken root in dark corners across Appalachia. In exchange for unwavering loyalty and fresh corpses, these hives offer a few struggling humans salvation. A fresh start. It’s an offer that none refuse.

Crane is grateful. Among his hive’s followers, Crane has found a chance to transition, to never speak again, to live a life that won’t destroy him. He even met Levi: a handsome ex-Marine and brutal killer who treats him like a real man, mostly. But when Levi gets Crane pregnant—and the hive demands the child’s birth, no matter the cost—Crane’s desperation to make it stop will drive the community that saved him into a devastating spiral that can only end in blood.

You Weren’t Meant to Be Human is a deeply personal horror; a visceral statement about the lives of marginalized people in a hostile world, echoing the works of Stephen Graham Jones and Eric LaRocca.

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My Review: Is this story literally intended to be about a hive...powerfully coded culturally as an insect-related word...that controls people to their detriment? Are the hives metaphors for the horrors of cishet society demanding conformity of people not like them? Are the hives infestations of the criminal organizations demanding obedience of the Appalachian people in exchange for the smallest amount of human dignity...or else?

Yes.

The answer is none/all/a combination of these and more. This is why I rate the body horror story as highly as I do. Author White is avowedly transmasc. The story could've been his own; he could be Crane; the body horror could be, is, intensely personal. It is laid out in terms of Crane's quest for bodily autonomy, its various phases and faces of denial and deprivation of this great, fundamental freedom. Trading transphobia for misogyny is not trading up. It is still the imposition of ignorance on top of your own knowledge, the unwillingness of the uneducated to do the work of acquiring the information needed to distinguish between discomfort and threat.

The hive isn't precise or even visible, it's a shifting...space...delineated by rotten stinking meat and a control mechanism brutally physical and insidiously psychological. This is the essence of horror to me. The ugly inner workings of systems of control and brutalization for dominance assertion. The denial of the fundamental freedom, autonomy...self-determination...that all Others endure. That is, throughout time and space, the one sin qua non of horror stories. It gives me shivers even conceptualizing it.

What Author White does best in this story is mobilize all the tropes of horror to embody the reality of an authoritarian world. What the alluring promises of it devolve into. What the systems of oppression will resort to in order to accomplish their hidden aims. Are they even hidden, or are we simply discouraged from noticing them? Accused of being paranoid, thereby handily Othered in an uncontestable way?

The way the story ends, I won't say "wraps up" it's too easy, isn't heartening or triumphal or celebratory. It is instructive. It is condign. It does not spare a thought for the offense against "nice"ness it's made you endure. And surprisingly made you...appreciate, since enjoy is a completely wrong stop to pull on Literature's pipe-organ.

I think this read will titillate the horror seeker, educate the knowledge seeker, and validate the entomophobic person's visceral rejection of reeking, rotting things for what they harbor.

SPHINX: A Neo-Gothic Novel from Brazil, interesting artifact of transness' long history among humans

SPHINX: A Neo-Gothic Novel from Brazil
COELHO NETO (tr. Kim F. Olson; intro M. Elizabeth Ginway; afterword Jess Nevins)
Modern Language Association of America (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$32.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A work of supernatural fantasy that questions gender divisions

At his boardinghouse in Rio de Janeiro, the Englishman James Marian is seen as handsome but eccentric. Then another boarder learns Marian's a fusion of a female head and a male body, Marian is the creation of a surgeon with occult powers. Despite his wealth and mysterious abilities, Marian is unable to live fully as either a man or a woman, traveling the world in order to repress his sexual desire and withdraw from society.

Sphinx explores the binaries of science and magic, body and spirit, male and female, attraction and horror, presenting its sexually ambiguous protagonist with sympathy. Ornately descriptive, this 1908 neo-gothic novel exemplifies the era's taste for the sensual and the fantastic. With echoes of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, it stands as a classic of Brazilian science fiction.

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My Review: Like Frankenstein, I'd call this speculative fiction, and reserve "science fiction" and even "science fantasy" for tales from the Radium Age; I think this book is more ancestral to what we think of as SF than developmentally connected. I think your pleasure in the read will more lie in the context of its times and its author's life, than in its mannered nineteenth-century prose. Be certain to read the modern contextualization materials to get the best effect from the read.

It is very surprising to me that, over a hundred years ago, the topic of sex being a fluid construct was happening in public discussion. The suppression and repression of queer people of all stripes is a long-term project of the hateful exclusionary reactionaries in society. Put a name to something as a means of understanding it, and it also functions as a target. Well, there is not and has never been a tool that did not do double duty as a weapon.

James Marian is a character whose lineaments do not fit the world as it is. Marian's body and mind have been deliberately altered, as a kind of proof of concept in a modern interpretation, an experiment in the parlance of the times. The way the melding of a male with a female was accomplished is both surgical and mystical in its origin. That suits the time of its writing but feels...odd, a cheat...in the SF landscape of today. I encourage you to read this story as a meditation on the experience of transness, a concept barely formulated in 1908, and certainly not familiar to the reading public.

This is a read for the most curious among you. It has pleasures to offer; it is flawed in execution; it stands as proof there are no new thoughts among humans, if transness as an acquired physical state was conceptualized in 1908.

Binaries are rare in nature. Spectra are the norm. It's long past time to apply that knowledge of facts to humans as well as all other entities in nature.

MARGARET KILLJOY'S PAGE: THE SAPLING CAGE, transfem MC wants to save the kingdom; & A COUNTRY OF GHOSTS, queer, anarchist SF

THE SAPLING CAGE (Daughters of the Empty Throne #1)
MARGARET KILLJOY
The Feminist Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 ebook, availablle now

Rating: 4.5* of five

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 URSULA K. LeGUIN PRIZE! Winner announced on 21 October 2025.

The Publisher Says: In the gripping first novel in the Daughters of the Empty Throne trilogy, author Margaret Killjoy spins a tale of earth magic, power struggle, and self-invention in an own-voices story of trans witchcraft.

Lorel has always dreamed of becoming a witch: learning magic, fighting monsters, and exploring the world beyond the small town where she and her mother run the stables. Even though a strange plague is killing the trees in the Kingdom of Cekon and witches are being blamed for it, Lorel wants nothing more than to join them. There’s only one problem: all witches are women, and she was born a boy.

When the coven comes to claim her best friend, Lorel disguises herself in a dress and joins in her friend’s place, leaving home and her old self behind. She soon discovers the dark powers threatening the kingdom: a magical blight scars the land, and the power-mad Duchess Helte is crushing everything between her and the crown. In spite of these dangers, Lorel makes friends and begins learning magic from the powerful witches in her coven. However, she fears that her new friends and mentors will find out her secret and kick her out of the coven, or worse.

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My Review: Transfem main character in a fantasy novel? Yes please. What else, one might reasonably ask, would Author Killjoy (transfem herself) write? Short answer: Any-damn-thing she likes. The fantasy universe here is beautifully evoked, the system of magic is well-thought-out, the costs the use of magic exacts on the user are all both disturbing and condign, this is in short the kind of secondary-world fantasy one always hopes to find.

Lorel herself, our PoV character, is carefully delineated to be consistent: born a boy in a world where magic is only wielded by females, transfem Lorel (believably bisexual in desire) is clearly female coded from the off. She does not like violence, but can definitely motivate her aggression in defense of loved ones or in the face of inflicted violence. She's somewhat spottily presented to our mind's eye, in that her deliberate changes of gender presentation aren't detailed. I wasn't sure why someone presented as wearing a dress the last time she was described putting her hair in a man's topknot and passing after that. What happened to the dress? Was a dress a unisex garment? If not why make a point of her wearing one?

These are minor things to me, though, in the face of Lorel's journey into her true nature. Being within her society and still Othered, Lorel's way of observing the anarchist functioning of the witches was far less didactic than A Country of Ghosts (q.v.) It came across as an apprentice learning the ropes, watching the experts for tips and tricks, which is exactly what one expects. A coming-of-age story that's also a very risky coming-out story is a great set-up for a series about a fantasy world. It is, though, a set-up, so this is not a full story. There are, thank goodness, details left to develop...but that isn't always totally satisfying. I've knocked off a half-star for those holes falling too deep at times.

I loved the experience of learning about the magic system. I'm not going to go into it here because the idea is best encountered without early access to the facts. Discover with Lorel what magic is, can do, and exacts from its practitioners...and why.

I'm glad to say that, as book one of a trilogy, this is not full of tension-killing explanations. It will be interesting to see how Lorel, learning to trust herself as a transfem person, reconciles that with her culture's restriction of magical practice to biofem people. What will this do among the witches? Will the immediate consequences turn dire in this supremely cozy world?

Future books will tell!

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

A COUNTRY OF GHOSTS
MARGARET KILLJOY
AK Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$16.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: An epic political fantasy in the tradition of Tepper and Le Guin that explores the question of what an anarchist community can do to resist the assaults that are sure to come if any such social formation were to exist.

Dimos Horacki is a Borolian journalist and a cynical patriot, his muckraking days behind him. But when his newspaper ships him to the front, he’s embedded in the Imperial Army and the reality of colonial expansion is laid bare before him. His adventures take him from villages and homesteads to the great refugee city of Hronople, built of glass, steel, and stone, all while a war rages around him. The empire fights for coal and iron, but the anarchists of Hron fight for their way of life.

A Country of Ghosts is a novel of utopia besieged and a tale that challenges every premise of contemporary society.

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My Review: Very much in the same vein as The Dispossesed, a philosophical exploration of anarchy as a means of social organization. The horrors of hypercapitalism bashing into the anarchic anti-hegemony are always fun and interesting to encounter.

Told as a story, these ideas and attitudes make a much more lasting mark on the psyche than do more explanatory ideological works. It's easy to invest in the people Author Killjoy creates, as one might expect from the author of the Danielle Cain novellas.

There's nothing false, or clangorous, in Author Killjoy's work. There is no dumbing-down or slighting of issues that arise from this world's way of functioning. It's true that our ignorant interloper from imperialism needs to be brought up to speed. I don't think this counts as the dreaded infodumping, because the explicit intent of the story is to contrast a high-control system based on coercion crashing into a non-system of personal responsibility and collective action. Armies are fighting, and that should be impossible in anarchy...yet here we are, and Dimos (our stand-in) needs to understand why. He's set up as a muckraking journalist by temperament. He's shown to be an ill-fitting bit of grit in the imperial army's system, someone who is a misfit and outsider.

The way he's educated in anarchist principles of respect, for self, for others, for the natural world as it is absent religious stuff, is inspiring. I enjoyed the way Dimos's struggle to wrap his head around this utterly alien way of thinking is portrayed. After witnessing the imperials committing war crimes, his mind was more flexible and receptive. It made the way the Hron (literally "ghosts") explain their lives to him hit harder:

We are anarchists, and we are immortal. We are the country of ghosts, and we are immortal. We will fight them until we are dead, and our bones will fight them after. The memory of our existence will fight them…in each of their hearts we will brand the memory that those who are free will never yield. Today, let us be ghosts!
–and–
Take care of yourself. No, to hell with that, take care of your friends and let them take care of you. Do stupid things for them.

It's so very much not the way the individualistic empire invading them thinks; Dimos is slowly taking on board this radical reorientation of his worldview. Dimos is a bit of a gender essentialist, though being gay himself he might not have been...that's an authorial lacuna, along with the absence of enby folk among the Hron. I'm not sure he would ever bother to learn not to be, but it did actually clang through my awareness that he was an outsider among the Hron as much as within the empire he was born into.

A book that is so ambitious in its asks of the reader that it startled me how smoothly it went down. Every last one of my four stars was coated in a thick frosting of readerly happiness.

But ostriches? Really?

THE DEFAULT WORLD, like the title, the story repays more introspective thought

THE DEFAULT WORLD
NAOMI KANAKIA
Amethyst Editions (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$8.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A trans woman sets out to exploit a group of wealthy roommates, only to fall under the spell of their glamorous, hedonistic lifestyle in tech-bubble San Francisco.

Years after fleeing San Francisco and getting sober, Jhanvi has made a life for herself working at a grocery co-op and saving for her surgeries. But when her friend (and sometimes more) Henry mentions that he and his techie festival-goer friends spent $100,000 to transform a warehouse basement into a sex dungeon, Jhanvi starts wondering if there’s a way to exploit these gullible idiots. She returns to San Francisco, hatching a plan to marry Henry for his company’s generous healthcare benefits.

Jhanvi enters a world of beautiful, decadent fire eaters and their lavish sex parties. But as her pretensions to cynicism and control start to fade, she develops a Gatsbyesque attraction to these happy young people and their bold claims of unconditional love. But do any of her privileged new friends really like or accept her? Her financial needs expose the limits of a community built on limitless self-expression, and soon she has to choose between doing what’s right, and doing what’s right for her.

This darkly funny novel skewers privileged leftist millennial tech culture, and asks whether "found family" is just another of the 21st-century's broken promises.

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

My Review: Goals and aspirations are like morals and principles: without them you're adrift, with them you're at risk, under their spell you're doomed. Stop introspecting and examining yourself, your mental construct, your inner dialogue, and see how fast the fall from the moral high ground comes.

Surfaces aren't very pretty after you've experienced what Jhanvi has. All that energy to become a surface version of a fantasy she's had locked in her head until it's eaten every other thought in there. Like Saltburn, like The Talented Mr. Ripley, this is open to a facile reading of "how awful these rich scum are" followed by "what a prick this grifter is."

Don't stop there.

How horrible a world do we live in when this kind of grift is the only way to get what that very world has conditioned you to think you want?

The dimwitted techies are awful; Jhanvi is horrible; but who here hasn't bought into the surface glamour of the world as it points its skeletal finger directly at your core of lack and absence, to say "fill that this way to be truly full at last?" It's seductive because it sounds easy and we want it to be true. It's neither. This is the beating heart of Author Kanakia's story.

The sheer chutzpah of writing across race and class and hotness boundaries about the things that both cross and reinforce those boundaries in such a direct narrative voice! That it comes out of a deeply unreliable narrator's mind. That it's entitled "The Default World." That Jhanvi's completely sure she's Right. That she never tips her hand...you can read Author Kanakia's story on any level you meet it at, come away sure that's The Right Way to see it, and no one can tell you otherwise. That is craft at an unusually high level.

Beware of Being Right. It is addictive and destructive and utterly blindingly grotesquely wrong.

I'm aware that a lot of people found this a challenging story to accept. I think that's excellent. I assure you Jhanvi is only fictionalized, not fictional. She's alive and well and grifting her heart out in reality more certainly now than ever when trans folk are under attack in 2025-Felonious-Yam Murruhkuh. I say, good on ya babay and more power to you in the quest to become yourself.

The big problem for the Jhanvis of the world, the Henrys and Katies of the world is discovering you *are* yourself already, and you don't like that person.

So why didn't I finish the book off with the rest of that fifth star? Because setting the story in the Aughties felt like Author Kanakia wanted to be safe, putting it at a distance. That was uncharacteristically cheap. But there's nothing to say others will feel that way.

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.

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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!

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.

TRANS MEDICINE: The Emergence and Practice of Treating Gender, urgently needed explication of a subject most people do not "get"

TRANS MEDICINE: The Emergence and Practice of Treating Gender
stef m. shuster
NYU Press
$28.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A rich examination of the history of trans medicine and current day practice

Surfacing in the mid-twentieth century, yet shrouded in social stigma, transgender medicine is now a rapidly growing medical field. In Trans Medicine, stef shuster makes an important intervention in how we understand the development of this field and how it is being used to "treat" gender identity today.

Drawing on interviews with medical providers as well as ethnographic and archival research, shuster examines how health professionals approach patients who seek gender-affirming care. From genital reconstructions to hormone injections, the practice of trans medicine charts new medical ground, compelling medical professionals to plan treatments without widescale clinical trials to back them up. Relying on cultural norms and gut instincts to inform their treatment plans, shuster shows how medical providers' lack of clinical experience and scientific research undermines their ability to interact with patients, craft treatment plans, and make medical decisions. This situation defies how providers are trained to work with patients and creates uncertainty. As providers navigate the developing knowledge surrounding the medical care of trans folk, Trans Medicine offers a rare opportunity to understand how providers make decisions while facing challenges to their expertise and, in the process, have acquired authority not only over clinical outcomes, but over gender itself.

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My Review: "Gender-affirming care" is a phrase that, to me, ought to be unexceptionable, even anodyne. Instead it causes fury and terror among people who subscribe to high-control religious and social systems.

I've never understood why.

I'm an old, cisqueer, white guy. I participate in several streams of privilege. I have no tiniest sense that my privilege is in any way threatened by the existence and/or acceptance and/or celebration of people not like me. The threats to my privilege come from those who want to deny the legitimacy of any of the founts of the privileges I enjoy. Trans folk aren't among those people as far as I can tell.

And this is despite the long, tragic history of gender-affirming care's resisters. That same kind of control is what we all agree is terrible about anti-Semitism. But it's okay when directed against those transgender...? Why? Because you, o great-hater, aren't yourself trans? Are you Jewish? Does that make hating Jews okay? Difference is not evidence of turpitude, or some kind of curse; spectra are the norm in all systems of what we call (without knowing what it means) the real world. We've barely begun to understand the world as it is. Part of that learning is, of necessity, not knowing, having certainty taken from us.

Somehow this kind of person doesn't ever answer these kinds of questions or address these realities. Their old certainties feel too comfy to give them up.

Most of us who aren't trans have no concept of what it takes to get access to gender-affirming care. I had only an inkling before I read this book. My inkling is still more than most have, and I'm now au fait with a much greater swath of how the concept of affirming the gender of a trans person came about. How it's been debated and designed to exclude, how it's been denied...a human-rights violation if there ever was one...how it's been weaponized and reshaped by the great-haters.

I have never met a trans person who is anything but kind, caring, and decent. Not one trans person I know, or know of, has ever advocated for anything remotely like enforcing their identity on anyone. The canard that education about trans people makes more trans people is a (deliberate, says my inner cynic) misframing of the truth: Education gives trans people access to an identity. to a word, an idea, that they know from the inside describes and delineates them. Had I grown up twenty years before I did, I would never have been aware or brave enough to invent gayness for myself. Education doesn't create difference, it enables the different to define themselves, to discover they are not the first, the only, the freak.

Gender affirmation will never be easy for some, there are trans people who struggle with it, too. This is a huge reason it needs affirming care from trained professionals. "It costs too much" is an absurd sentence coming from anyone in the richest country...the richest culture...there has ever been on the planet. No one should go without in a world of obscene abundance. That most definitely includes trans folk.

This book's essay-and-excerpt fabric will keep some readers from fully investing in the concepts. I found the sheer breadth of identities all speaking in support of trans-affirming care to be one of the greatest strengths of the read. I encourage other allies, and those who simply do not understand the idea of transness, to pick the book up. It can, if you decide to allow it to, help you find your empathy for these, our sibling humans.