Written in 2015, I couldn't remember if I had read this years ago when it was released or if I had just heard about it and read excerpts, so I dug in and read it in its entirety and it holds up.  In fact, almost all of the main topics covered in this book about living beyond the gender binary and heteronormativity to which our systemic structures are beholden could have been written today.  These topics were not new in 2015, but this book was written at a time when the emerging, radical ideas from the era that preceded it had been academicalized and solidified with enduring language and a coherent world view that has stuck. 

This memoir is steeped in Queer theory and is well worth a read.

Recommend.

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This is such an unusual and sweet book.  In many ways, it is a classic coming-of-age story, with self-discovery and coming to accept one's place in the world, but what makes this story so, so lovely is that the protagonist who is discovering himself and goes on a quest of sorts is 65 and facing mandatory retirement from the postal service where he worked since he was a teenager. 

The characters in the book are richly developed, even the peripheral ones. The plot is unusual, with just the right amount of foreshadowing and unexpected turns.  The writing itself has a clip to it that is charming. It sometimes feels like it is meandering, but then sort of wanders back to the point with just the right amount of description and prose.  I ended up just really loving this book.

Recommend.
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This book is supposedly shelved as a YA book, but I found it to be much more sophisticated than that with layers to the story that could hold multiples truths at the same time. It is a harsh depiction of white feminism that is also able to appreciate the complexity of the criticism. To be able to honor the work without shying away from its imperfections, shortcomings, and both subtle and overt racism is not easy, yet here is done exquisitely.  

The book reads like a memoir and follows the growth of a starstruck college student from The Bronx as she moves in with a feminist Queer icon in Portland for a summer. On one level, it is a coming of age story, but it is just so much more than that.

Any white woman trying to be a supportive mentor to women and girls of color should make time to read this wonderfully nuanced and beautifully written book about the complexity of these relationships and how the insidiousness of racism and privilege are pervasive, even when white people are trying to do better.  I loved the layered relationships, the hard work reflected in the characters who were trying to hold people accountable and the ones trying to be held accountable, even when their failures were cringeworthy.

Set in Portland in 2003, the author's description of the quirkiness and cringy-ness of the city and its inhabitants conveyed the love-hate relationship that so many people have with the sometimes performative, sometimes genuine progressive and woo-woo culture there. From the public reading at Powell Books, to the hangouts in Pioneer Courthouse Square, to navigating the neighborhoods on foot and by public transit, it is fun to read a book about a city you know well.

Highly recommend.
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This book has a combination of things I usually do not like. 
 
First, I am not a fan at all of the social media influencer memoir.  I think somewhere fairly early in the pandemic, I overdosed on crappy ones that I got for free or that were recommended to me and I have not gotten over that.  They tend to have a number of features I do not like, such as referring back to what they posted, quoting those posts, and bragging about how early an adopter they were of a specific platform and how the fame they got and the money they made from said platform saved or ruined (or both) their lives. Many of these books are often compilations of blog posts that do not transcend mediums well when they get put into a book without a good editor. They are often repetitive in a way that reminds me of people who just tell the same few stories over and over again. 
 
Second, I tend not to love the writings of standup comics, especially ones who have a chaotic style of raunchy standup. I can take that in very small doses, but an entire 8 hour book is just too much.  The writing here felt a bit like Jenny Lawson (Let's Pretend This Never Happened), which I kind of just despised. 
 
Third, I usually do not like books read by the author. I often think they should have hired a professional with a voice I actually want to listen to, which I know might sound harsh, but I really love a good narrator and one way to tell a really good narrator is when you speed it up (which I virtually always do), you can still understand them clearly and their voice still conveys the emotion. This is not true of mediocre narrators and author are usually mediocre or worse, in my opinion.
 
While there were spots where she fell into the annoying "this is what I posted when I was an early adopter of instagram" context, it was short-lived.  She definitely had places that were slightly repetitive and other places where she went on too long about details that felt show-off-y to me without advancing the story which caused the narrative to lag a little. It felt like she really needed a more heavy handed editor.
 
That said, this book was, for the most part, an outlier on all fronts. It is very difficult to write trauma comedy, either for stand-up or in book form, and this is really trauma comedy at its best.  The places where she veers away from the style are the places that should have been cut. I particularly loved how she situated her complex relationship between humor and tragedy in the context of her cultural and familiar history. The intergenerational way in which her family used humor and laughter to survivor horrible things was so richly described here. She didn't have to directly talk about "rape jokes" to be talking about rape jokes told by survivors in her family.  It wasn't just that she decided one day to make comedy about trauma, she explains how this was passed down as a way to survive. I found it insightful, poignant, and (yes, even) funny. Through the bets parts, I found myself on the verge of both laughing and crying and in a place of acceptance that this was ok and maybe could even be healing  It reminded me of Hannah Gadsby in this respect.
 
Recommend. But maybe skim through the parts in the middle about buying the expensive purses and the celebrity name dropping parts.
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I am so enthralled with the very concept of this book in which the author uses her obsession with sea creatures as the basis of these fabulous life stories that use the sea creatures as complex allegories for her life. Even the title, referring to the point in an ocean where the light can no longer penetrate, relates to moments in her life.  As a memoir, it is insightful and tells the story of a unique life of Queerness and mixed-race identity.

I particularly appreciated how the author's experience of trauma and sexual assault were presented in such an unusual and poignant way.  All of this was done in the midst of providing rich details about marine ecosystems and creatures, some of which (like the octopus), we often hear about in other contexts, but some  of which I knew nothing about and found fascinating.  This is just such an unusual set-up and read. 

I highly recommend it.

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I really enjoyed Beyond the Cerulian Sea and so I was disappointed that I did not love this book.  I really don't like being spoon fed morality in my novels and this one left nothing up to interpretation.  The metaphors and symbology were just too obvious and the pionts felt like they were being rammed down my throat at some points.  I obviously think that having trans representation in fiction is important and powerful, but my underlying take away from this book was that only magical beings (read Queer) can take care of magical kids and magical beings can only depend and trust magical beings. I can understand where this mentality comes from, but I just think that there is a lot more nuance than what this books allows for.  I found it pretty depressing, rather than inspiring, and a letdown.  The first book took quite a while to grow on me, but once it did, I was all in.  This one had the benefit of my coming in really excited for it and just progressively getting more and more let down as it went on.

Do not recommend.

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This is a fascinating read that certainly is not for everyone. It provides a unique perspective on the sex industry, including the author's time as a dancer and as a porn star.  The emotional abuse she experienced as a child led to physical and sexual abuse as an adult and ongoing mental health and addition issues.  In many ways, the books is self-aware an insightful, while at other times demonstrating the sometimes baffling nature of trauma.  While she never seems to see herself as having been exploited, it is hard not to read that into the story.  In fact, she is defensive of her choice to do sex work and articulates it in many ways as a choice that was empowering. At times she seems oblivious to the toll it took or how it related to the myriad of issues that she had.  Despite its drawbacks, it really is a fairly captivating read with a lot of explicit content--not just the assaults and abuse, but also the sex.  Proceed with caution, but while I can't fully recommend it, I also can't really not recommend it, either.

Not not recommended.

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This memoir was written by one of the co-authors of The Courage To Heal, which is perhaps the book that has impacted me the most in my life. Written in 1994 originally, I read this first in 1988 when it was first released and many of the passages framed how I think about child sex abuse.  That book is quite dated now, though sections of it are as relevant to survivors now as it was then.  The Burning Light of Two Stars is the story of the complex relationship between the author and her mother. That complexity is bound up in their experiences of child sex abuse, the mother's failure to protect her, and the work they did, although primarily the author did, to try to find a way to reconnect as adults, if not exactly to repair the relationship.  I found the read insightful and appreciated that it did not suggest that this approach is always or even often possible and that it did not shy away from the pain that reengaging in the relationship caused.  Highly dysfunctional families so often are portrayed in two-dimensional ways that I think harm survivors of abuse.  This book addressed her choice to remain engaged head on in a unique and powerful way.

Recommend.

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It is particularly difficult to review a book like this when you are friends with the author, but nevertheless I will endeavor to be objective.  This is a niche read.  It is a delicate read about surviving sexual abuse in the context of Christian religion, about healing within the teachings of the church, and about finding meaning in a religious tradition that often seems to turn a deliberately cold and harsh shoulder to survivors. Having not struggled with this issue of situating abuse within a religious tradition, I found it fascinating to read about, while also feeling detached from the experience.  Many times, I just wondering why making such an effort to find love, meaning, and acceptance in a system with such a long and continuing history of abuse is hard for me to relate to, which is, of course, one of the reasons we read--to find understanding of someone else's experience.  I would imagine that for folks teaching about theology, religion, and abuse, and for those who have experience abuse within the church community, this would be a truly impactful read.  For other working with survivors, I think it provides insight into this particular struggle that is not commonly talked about.  I am not sure its appeal would be widespread enough for a recommendation, but I also don't not recommend it at all.

Not not recommended.
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The author's writing style here is not my favorite, both in terms of what sometimes feels like he is prattling on about things to fill up space, but also because he really likes a subtle cliffhanger.  The book is written in sections that are each 7 years apart, presumably based on the Waldorf or other similar theories about the important of 7-year developmental blocks divided in to 3 parts and an epilogue.  At the end of most (maybe all?) chapters, we are left in the middle of an event, the details of which are abandoned while we jump to the next time period.  I am sure this is meant to have some literary value and for sure all of the loose ends are tied up, but I found it irritating o have so many important facts just left hanging for so long.  It wasn't at all clear we were going to circle back to the dangling pieces and left me feeling hyper-aware of this as a literary tool.  I just found it distracting from the story.

However, given that I didn't love the prose itself and was irritated with the author's literary choices, by about part 3, I found myself very much immersed in the story on a number of levels.  I loved the complexity of the emotions and characters.  I really had to slog my way through the early years, which were a bit pedantic -- with a lot of emphasis on boys in all boy environments obsessed with their bodies and the ways they could use them.  At some point, though, the entire tenor of the book changed and I was quite surprised to find that as the character himself matured, the narrative did, too, until it had something meaningful to say.  

This story arc of a gay man's life in an homophobic world beginning in 1945 and continuing until 2015 was ultimately worthwhile, with insight about what growing up Queer was like and how that shapes a person's experiences and actions.

On a side note, I did not love how it dealt with a side issue of child sex abuse, which was told from the point of view of a woman who experienced abuse as a child and blamed herself in large part.  There was no counterpoint, leaving the narration of the story feeling victim blamey.  But, it was enough of a side issue and, given the context in which the story is told, it undoubtedly reflects how many women in her situation viewed the dynamics of what happened.

Recommend.

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