Urgent, tender, and brimming with unruly hope, I Hope We Choose Love feels less like a book and more like a hand held out across the wreckage. In a world fraying at the edges, Kai Cheng Thom offers an aching, defiant belief: that love — complicated, imperfect, and fiercely honest — is the only way forward.

In this searing collection of essays, Thom wrestles with the contradictions and heartbreaks of queer community, laying bare the painful truth that even the spaces we build with care can replicate the harms we sought to escape. She moves with generosity and precision through the thorniest terrain — cancel culture, accountability, consent, identity politics — refusing easy answers in favor of messy, vulnerable questions. "I don’t want to be validated. I want to be loved," Thom insists, cutting through the neoliberal gloss that too often sanitizes justice work into spectacle rather than solidarity.

Thom’s writing is most luminous when she examines the failures of punitive culture, challenging us to imagine relationships capacious enough to hold harm, repair, and grace without collapsing into retribution. Her analysis of how essentialism fractures our movements — how binaries and "oppression olympics" foreclose real understanding — feels both incisive and deeply personal, rooted in her lived experience as a trans woman of Chinese heritage.

If at times the essays feel repetitive or if certain provocations could have benefited from deeper engagement, the emotional resonance never falters. Thom writes not as a distant critic but as someone embedded in the struggle, scarred and still believing. Her vision of queer chosen family, strained under the pressures of homonormativity, reminds us that community is not a utopia but a commitment — one that must be constantly, tenderly remade.

Ultimately, I Hope We Choose Love is a necessary intervention for anyone weary of the cycles of shame and disposability that plague our movements. Thom doesn’t offer a roadmap out of the apocalypse. She offers something harder and more beautiful: an invitation to stay soft, stay honest, and choose each other anyway.

📖 Read this if you love: abolitionist visions of community care, nuanced critiques of cancel culture, radical frameworks for transformative justice, and the works of adrienne maree brown or Mariame Kaba.

🔑 Key Themes: Love and Accountability, Queer Community and Chosen Family, Punitive Culture and Harm Reduction, Trans Liberation and Cultural Heritage, Justice Beyond Retaliation.