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.

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

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!

SOME STRANGE MUSIC DRAWS ME IN: A Novel, trans awakening story

SOME STRANGE MUSIC DRAWS ME IN: A Novel
GRIFFIN HANSBURY
W. W. Norton & Company (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From an award-winning author, this provocative novel tells an emotionally gripping story about friendship, family, and transgender awakening in a working-class American town.

It’s the summer of 1984 in Swaffham, Massachusetts, when Mel (short for Melanie) meets Sylvia, a tough-as-nails trans woman whose shameless swagger inspires Mel’s dawning self-awareness. But Sylvia’s presence sparks fury among her neighbors and throws Mel into conflict with her mother and best friend. Decades later, in 2019, Max (formerly Mel) is on probation from his teaching job for, ironically, defying speech codes around trans identity. Back in Swaffham, he must navigate life as part of a fractured family and face his own role in the disasters of the past.

Populated by a cast of unforgettable characters, Some Strange Music Draws Me In is a propulsive page turner about multiple electrifying relationships—between a working-class mother and her queer child, between a trans man and his right-wing sister, and between a teenager and her troubled best friend. Griffin Hansbury, in elegant, arresting, and fearless prose, dares to explore taboos around gender and class as he offers a deeply moving portrait of friendship, family, and a girlhood lived sideways. A timely and captivating narrative of self-realization amid the everyday violence of small-town intolerance, Some Strange Music Draws Me In builds to an explosive conclusion, illuminating the unexpected ways that difference can provide a ticket to liberation.

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

My Review: There is always a class divide in capitalist societies. There are reinforced, heteronormative binaries; there are intense pressures to conform. In 1984, these things were unquestioned, and enforced by laws prohibiting "crossdressing" and enabling parents to abuse and harm their children physically and psychically to "straighten them out."

There was a lot more, but that's plenty for now, if you weren't there you should be glad you missed the AIDS deaths, the hoo-rah for Reagan shit, the pillaging of Social Security...oh dear, starting to sound familiar? Oh, I forgot: the war on workers, the plant closures, the pension-fund thefts....

None of that shit is foregrounded but it very much makes the attitude (transfem) Sylvia carries, downright truculent, make more sense than it already does. Melanie...Mel...is attracted to Sylvia for her serious edge, her survivor's black humor, her wealth of knowledge Mel wants and needs. Mel wants to become Max. Mel has no way to verbalize that, has no framework to put a new mind into, is reeling from the very existence of someone...someone she knows...holding a slightly skewed mirror to her thus showing that she is real, there are others.

Of course, capitalist patriarchy is not about to let Mel go.

I'm queer but not trans; I've known it since 1966 without knowing what it was or meant, just that it was me. As a male, my path was hugely easier than Mel's or even Sylvia's. I got threatened and bullied in school. No one ever followed through because I'm also large and tall. It was entirely bad enough; these characters would've given anything to be in my so-easy place. I hurt for them now, in this miraculously better world we've wrestled into being that can never be left to just run the right way because "They"...the god squad, the macho pindicks, the scumbag transphobes...will not allow it. Our lives, our happiness, our progress, all threaten "Them" in some inexplicable way.

I still don't get that. I have the one "christian" sister who said to my face (okay, my ear, it was by phone) that gay marriage threatened her church because "what if "They" make us perform a wedding?! It will diminish my marriage!"

I was more patient then and did not simply hang up and never speak to her again. We had a discussion, but I was so sick with rage that I remember little of it except telling her that if someone sued their church to force them to marry a couple queers I'd contribute heavily to their legal defense fund.

Again, this is mild compared to what the characters face in this story.

It's never been easy to be Other. It leads to the emotional and physical violence of being Othered. As the story moves from 1984 to 2019, I felt a lot of the emotional rawness, the highs and the lows, leaching out; the author wanted, like me, to make some points, and in the context of a novel that drains dramatic tension below optimal levels. It doesn't ever recover, though. We get a satisfactory ending where from the jump I was primed by the intensity of the story for a satisfying one. It's not bad, it's not poorly thought out; it just didn't go to the next level. Things like Mel becoming Max don't resonate like the woofers at a concert because we never delve, or even dabble, in the dysphoria inherent in transness pre-transition; we don't get, let's say, the bathroom-usage nightmares that make the pervasiveness of transphobia and its implicit capacity for potential lethality immediate.

So I land on four stars and strongly recommend you give this (after some probing questions, though) to someone trans you know and love. I think they'll really mean the thank you they offer.

BECOMING A VISIBLE MAN, 2nd edition, still nothing like it

BECOMING A VISIBLE MAN
JAMISON GREEN
Vanderbilt University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$34.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In a clear and logical style, Becoming a Visible Man tackles the history, biology, medicine, philosophy, and politics that claim to define and control gender in the US.

Profoundly personal and eminently practical, Jamison Green clarifies transgender experience for transgender people and their families, friends, and co-workers. Medical and mental healthcare providers, educators at every level, business leaders, and advocates seeking information about transgender concerns can all gain from Green's integrative approach to the topic. This book candidly addresses the emotional relationships that are impacted by a transgender transition, and brings refined integrity to the struggle to self-define, whether one undergoes a transition or chooses not to.

Emphasizing the lives of transgender men (who are often overlooked) he elucidates the experience of masculinity in a way that is self-assured and comforting, not demanding or threatening. Self-acceptance and health are always at the core of his message. Green's inspirational wisdom has informed and empowered thousands of readers with knowledge and compassion. There is still no other book like it in the transgender library.

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

My Review: Most people are profoundly unaware of the entire experience of being outside the gender binary in a world totally predicated on it. I was one, until I wasn't anymore, and like the "eww-ick" homophobes I've known and known of over the years, I had no idea how my ignorance would come across to the trans people I knew and know.

It is worth an empathetic look into the lived experience of the people you're Othering.

This is the second edition of a book now twenty years old. It helps to understand that; it helps to know that, while some things have changed, more have not...or have not for the better. Reading Author Green's personal story of knowing he was a man yet having the body of a woman is deeply moving. It is important to learn this from a person whose gender dysphoria was severe enough that the long, complicated road to gender-affirming treatment was the best option. For anyone who thinks this is a simple thing, read this book.

A lot of Author Green's impact on the conversation around trans issues stems from being willing to educate others about the topic. This is very much a book aiming to teach...at times a bit too determinedly so, hence that missing half-star. It can feel overwhelming. It has taken me literal years to read the book. It is, for me, an occasion of deep shame to realize how in my ignorance I was insensitive to my trans siblings. So learning the parameters of the experience of being trans has been a difficult reckoning, a hard catharsis, and a reason to look deep inside myself.

I know many are now looking at this and shuddering, thinking "no thanks." I would have as well. I did, apart from small bursts, for a long time. Not greatly to my credit I've chosen the first Pride Month of the Felonious Yam's second regime to finish and review it.

If you're having trouble seeing how this can even be a thing, try this analogy I found in the book. I'm paraphrasing here but: biosex is the hardware; cultural gender roles are the software; one's internal gender identity is the operating system that communicates between them and is the "user interface."

It's hugely helpful to me to have a simile to turn to for deeper understanding. What this does is offer a way in to "getting" how issues can arise in any of these ways of existing in the world. It also acts as a powerful reminder that there is not one single way to be literally anything in this world. All of life is in spectrums. We're educated in the US...in the religious-nut-capitalist world more generally...to see binaries, of which there are few. They're very comforting for lazy or stupid people but if science has taught us nothing else it's taught us that comfort is only bought at the exorbitant price of ignorance.

The annotated bibliography is quite something. The idea of all these sources existing in spite of every attempt to silence or disappear them by the screaming bigots is impressive. It also helps explain the screaming bigots' urgency in erasing us all. Information leads people to learning, and the habit of mind we call learning is the most potent weapon against the unreasoning hatred that is required for fascism and authoritarians to rule.

Resist them. Learn about the facts of transness from someone who lives it, and is willing to teach you when you're ready to be taught.