I have to admit: when I picked this up and started reading, one of the first things I had to do was go on Wikipedia and look up who the Mennonites were. Anabaptists, it said, and I had to look that up too. Yeah. My religious knowledge is pretty sparse. Honestly, though, I didn't need to know a lot to be able to follow along here. Shortly after her grandmother's funeral, Wendy discovers that her grandfather might have been trans. Being trans herself, this sets her to reinterpret their relationship in the light of their shared religious upbringing... an upbringing that Wendy is very lapsed from.

I gathered that much from the blurb, and while it's a focus of the book, it's not the whole of it. There's sex work and suicide and alcoholism, and parts of it are pretty grim. Leavening the misery is Wendy's relationship with her dad Ben, which is positive and loving and supportive. That was my favourite part of this, I think, but a close second has to be the pacing, which was very finely judged and kept me reading well after midnight last night because it was all zipping along so smoothly. I seem to have read a lot of slower-paced books recently, so this was a welcome change.