Reviews and Comments

I found The Mothers after watching a Barnes and Noble Tik Tok suggesting it in a collection of books to use while processing and challenging the Dobbs decision and the fall of Roe.

Thus, when I read it, I expected a narrative that would provided an unveiled, prochoice moral. The Mothers is so much more complex than that.

Bennett's debut novel is packed with dense, textured, realistic characters that leap off the page. A complex love triangle between Nadia Turner, Luke Sheppard, and Aubrey Evans weaves in and out of a tale that does include abortion, but also features black contemporary life, religion, class, and so much more.

The Mothers is worth your time.

If you'd like to know more about indigenous American comedy, Kliph Nesteroff chronicles some under-sung greats in We Had a Little Real-Estate Problem. The book is meandering and exclusively expository without a real thesis over content. Useful distraction for our current apocalypse.

ThisisHowitAlwaysIs by @Laurie_Frankel is a beautifully written novel covering #parenting, #trans-children, #family, and #myth. The beats of the story were tight and the tension kept me hanging on every moment. As a parent, I have wondered about how I would parent a trans-kid and Frankel's novel feels like a parental speculative fiction that lets the reader experience some of the inevitable obstacles that a family of a trans-child must overcome. I don't want to give a moment of it away.

This is How it Always Is by Frankel is beautiful and worth your time.

Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters (@torreypeters) begins with a title that could be interpreted a couple of ways, something that doesn't change as the novel continues. After starting the book, someone empathetic to the rights of transgender people might have misgivings if the title is declarative. However, the title is the beginning of a chronological list of events in the life of James/Amy/Ames.

The novel proposes a situation where a ciswoman, and two transwomen, try to start a family while drama ensues. The story is compelling from the first minute to the last and it contains glorious dialectics between the characters that lead to greater truths about transpeople, motherhood, womanhood, and families that meld smoothly into the winding plot.

Detransition, Baby is worth your time. Go read it.