Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book will be published in the US by Soho Press on April 1, 2025.

Jeanne Thornton’s A/S/L is a deeply evocative novel that pulses with the ache of queer longing, the glitchy hum of '90s internet culture, and the fractured beauty of trans survival. Spanning both 1998 and 2016, the book traces the lives of Abraxa, Sash, and Lilith—once gender-questioning teens crafting a video game called Saga of the Sorceress in an online chatroom, now estranged trans women navigating the messy terrain of adulthood.

Thornton’s prose captures the jagged edges of trans becoming: at times dreamy and poetic, other times raw and disjointed, reflecting the precarity of forging an identity under systems designed to erase you. The book hums with the tension between fantasy and reality—between the worlds we build to survive and the ones that threaten to break us. The teens’ game-building is rendered with reverence, positioning video games as queer art forms—portals into self-determination, into worlds where bodies and identities are mutable, magic. This creative defiance carries into adulthood, where the characters remain tethered to their shared past, still reaching for that elusive sense of home.

Abraxa is a tempest of restless movement and fierce imagination, clinging to the belief that Saga of the Sorceress was something more than a game—that it was, and still is, real. Lilith, burdened by the Boy Scout creeds of loyalty and self-discipline, seeks safety in cisnormative approval yet yearns for something wilder. Sash, craving connection, funnels her emotions into storytelling and financial domination, grasping for intimacy in commodified spaces. Each woman aches to be seen—not as a symbol or spectacle, but as a person worthy of love, creation, and survival.

If the novel stumbles, it’s in its pacing; certain chapters drag, and the structure occasionally feels unwieldy. But the emotional core remains potent. Thornton refuses tidy resolutions—because trans lives are not tidy. Instead, she offers something more radical: the possibility of rebuilding, together.

📖 Recommended For: Lovers of introspective trans fiction, stories exploring online communities and digital subcultures, and readers drawn to narratives about queer friendship and creative world-building; anyone nostalgic for late '90s internet culture or interested in the intersections of gender, technology, and art; and fans of Idlewild by James Frankie Thomas.

🔑 Key Themes: Trans Identity and Becoming, Queer Community and Longing, Creativity as Survival, Digital Worlds and Self-Determination, Power and Vulnerability in Relationships.