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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Set in the 1700s, this historical fiction is set in the extremely remote St. Kilda on the island of Hirta in an isolated and rugged region of northwest Scotland.  The story takes place when a boat trip full of boy and a few men go hunting for a particularly coveted type of bird as part of an annual tradition.  They get stranded on what seems to be a small rock formation in the sea.  The dozen or so men and boys are hungry, cold, and homesick--left with virtually no resources whatsoever. 

As if the isolation, cold, and hunger weren't enough to endure, the fake preacher does serious harm as he tries to control the boys with fear mongering and shame, which is especially heartbreaking as the younger boys, who are maybe 9 or 10, are tormented by the separation from their homes and starting to lose hope of rescue.  His approach to imposing confession and attributing sin to the children is horrifying, especially when he insists on everyone shunning one of the children for seven days by not talking to him at all.  He also tells the youngest child that when they run out of birds to eat, they will start eating the youngest kids first.  The brutality of the story just keeps coming in waves, without the kind of breaks for meaning or connection that I would have wanted to see.

The story is reminiscent of Lord of The Flies in that it is a group of boys stranded on an island, but this is a significantly better book than that one. This is dark in a different way, as the adults do nothing to mitigate the stress for the children.

There is also a weird side story about one of the children whose mother has been secretly raising her as a boy because she was afraid to tell the child's father that she wasn't a boy when she was born. This fact becomes evidence while they are marooned and the whole way it is handled is just odd.  I have to think it isn't possible to know how that would have been handled in the 1770's, but the way the book portrays it just felt off.

Apparently loosely based on a true story, the ending is especially depressing.  I am pretty surprised it is classified as a children's book, too.

Do not 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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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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If you liked Sapiens, you will probably love this book, too. 
I think I liked it more and I really liked Sapiens. The book is really clever in its layout, focusing on different aspects of women's bodies and how those can be traced back to various "Eves" who were the first ancestor to have those traits.  The author has a sense of humor that sometimes made me giggle the way one might giggle in a middle school sex ed class, but there were also entire sections that I found really interesting.  Her discussion about the history of midwifery was just fascinating.  From breastfeeding to menopause to tools to legs and hearing, this book kept me engaged the entire time.  I particularly loved the discussion about hearing ranges and loss in men and how male hearing loss corresponds with the pitch of young women's voices and babies cries.  

As a side note, I was pleasantly surprised at how the author dealt with trans-ness throughout the book.  It was a rare treat to have a book so rooted in bodies and particularly women's bodies be so nuanced in its treatment of trans bodies.

Highly recommend.

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This is a sweet sweet sweet young adult fiction about two trans-masculine kids exploring friendship and love together and apart.  Written for a slightly more mature audience than Cemetery Boys, this is one of the few trans-masc narratives that I have felt expressed the joy of transitioning and questioning ones gender identity, as well as the difficulties of navigating that experience in the context of complex familiar and cultural systems that are not always supportive.  This adds a layer of complexity by exploring the relationship between the two friends as their relationship moves between friendship and romantic interest, with one family supportive and one not.  There are themes of child sex abuse, but not related to the trans characters and none of that sub-plot is at all graphic, but the juxtaposition of how the Catholic family rallies around the child abused within the church while continuing to be unsupportive of their trans child is an interesting example of how families can step up for one child, while letting down another one, such that children growing up with different issues can have wildly different support networks.

​Recommend. 

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This book is a cross between Under The Whispering Door and Let's Pretend This Never Happened.  It is a very hyper read, with a high energy, scattered, neurotic narrator whose prose reflects their whirlwind existence.  Filled with demons and death hounds and the grim reaper, who haplessly and unknowingly kills people and animals by just pointing to them, the storyline itself is just weird, with even weirder characters.  I love quirky, but this is a quirky beyond what I could keep up with, as the storyline gets more bizarre and harder to follow.  Some parts are admittedly clever--like the whole concept of the "beta male" who is definitely not the alpha male, but who is doing all right in the wake of the alpha males.  I was never quite sure if the main character was really experiencing becoming a "death merchant" or if the whole story was goin to end up being a grief induced hallucination.  I'm actually still not sure, but since there is apparently an entire series, I suppose if this question haunts you after the first book, you could keep reading.  I, however, could barely tolerate the disjointed hyper-ness of volume one, so this is one series I will not be getting sucked into. I do know one Jennifer Lawson fan I will be recommending this to.

Side note: While there is a short-lived subplot that makes reference to a trans woman one of the characters is romantically corresponding with, there is some transphobic content that I thought was unnecessary and crass.
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​If this book is for you, you can click here to purchase this book and support My 50 Bookish Friends blog project.  For Under Whispering Door, click here and Let's Present This Never Happened, click here.

This review is going to include some spoilers that you might not want revealed for you if you are going to read this one, but I am so irritated with this book that I can't help it.  I am so sick of the "plot twist" that reveals that the case that so clearly appears to be one of domestic violence on the surface is actually a woman who has set up a situation to blame the boyfriend/husband for it.  Most recently made particularly popular in the wake of Gone Girl, this storyline is supposed to suck us into blaming a otherwise controlling or violent man when, surprise, it was never domestic violence at all.  All this does is perpetuate the myth that women lie about domestic violence and that whenever these allegations arise, we should be extremely skeptical.  This plot is particularly upsetting in the context of trying to raise awareness about and normalize trans-ness by telling a compelling and complex story about a trans teen girl in an unhealthy and violent relationship.  The development of her character is lovely.  She isn't a trope or a shell of a person.  Her mother is supportive and she has had supportive allies, as well as having experienced devastating transphobia and hate crimes.  This level of detail and this quality of writing could have been done without feeding into dangerous tropes about domestic violence.  I'm so disappointed.

Cannot recommend.

In typical John Irving fashion, this very long tome could easily have been three novels since the story wrapped up at several points, then droned on for a while during which time he rebuilt the stage for the next plotline.  During these downtimes, I was bored and frustrated with the narration--wanting it to have just ended at the previous climax instead of starting a whole new story.  But of course, once, the new scene was set, that story was worth telling and so we would go around again.  It is an unusual writing style and I can't say I love it.  It is reminiscent of A Prayer for Owen Meaney, which I also love-hated for the same reasons I struggled with this one.  There is so much to love here--dynamic Queer characters (include an absolutely unique and wonderful trans woman finding her place in 1950's America), a ghost story, extreme family dysfunction, and characters mulling over their role in the universe.  As with Owen Meany, I find the narrative over masculinized, though, and by that I mean that the characters don't resonate with motherhood and no one is nurturing.  In a multi-generational family novel like this, I prefer the storytelling to be more emotive and immersive, like The Color Purple or The Vanishing Half.  And while I say that, there is something unique about Irving's way of contextualizing alternative family that is enthralling and remarkable.  I have recommended both Owen Meany and Chairlift to a number of people who have enjoyed it substantially more than I did, but I can't give it a general recommend for general audience.

​Not recommended.

There are some things about this book to really love, particularly in the second half, but I had to really slog my way through the first part of it.  There is a lot of graphic intimate violence use to set the scene for what at first feels like an intergenerational story about trauma and "survival" that doesn't feel like survival at all.  The story itself, though, gets muddled before it gets sorted out at all, as it begins to unfold on two timelines--the original one of misery and a second one in which a movie is being made about the first one and so research ensues that leads to being able to fill in some of the blanks in the historical timeline. 

Eventually, and I do mean eventually because it takes a very, very long time, the two storylines start to make sense and remarkably intertwined as the connections become clear.  The second half or so of the book shifts away from the abuse and neglect, but leaves the pain and dysfunction that comes from unstable and unsafe early lives.  The impact, of course , of intergenerational trauma plays out through the lives, leaving expected fallout in its wake.  

Once we move beyond the backstory, the book significantly improves as the main character becomes obsessed with learning to fly as a young girl and remains fixated on that throughout her life, leading to adventures and relationships, with story twists and turns that are unanticipated, but not entirely unforeseen. 

If you can make it through the sexualized violence, addiction, and generalized misery that is the backbone of the story and like historical women's fiction, you'll do well with this one. Also, if you are interested in flying airplanes or travel to the north and south poles, you will probably find those parts of the story particularly interesting.  For me, the start was too much of a struggle to get through for a recommendation, even though by the end I liked the story.

Not recommended.