Just an incredible book; Snorton carefully hammers home his points again and again, drawing together transness and blackness through fungibility, movement, and transversality. It's a book that is so beautifully couched in the works of women of color feminism, queer of color and trans of color critique, and it's something I'm going to be chewing on for a really long time as I think about ways to teach and also write trans history broadly. Just a magnificent book, truly.

This book was very cute, and the world was pretty well built. The tone of it was sort of confusing--it felt pretty formal, and didn't mesh for me in the way I normally like--but that may also be a side effect of me like. Not having read an MG book in about 100 years. I think if you've got a kid who likes birds, or animal stories in general, they might really like this. As an adult, some of it seemed a little weird (as like a person who cannot turn their brain off, the sort of Biblical allegory seemed to really hit me over the head and I wasn't sure I was super comfortable with it) but obviously the message is positive and it doesn't go much further into that allegorical territory that I possibly just made up.

I am not the person to do this, but someone please link me to essays about Gaiman and writing Blackness because ooo boy I had a hot minute at the beginning where I went "aren't they supposed to be Black?" and then realized yes, they were supposed to be. I know Nalo Hopkinson was basically his sensitivity reader re: the Caribbean stuff, but ooo boy some of it just read weird, mostly the way Fat Charlie interacted with like other Black people. But again, not my place to write that hot take, I just really want to read stuff about it.

Now that that is out of the way, this book was like good but I would say not as good as I normally feel about Gaiman? I usually call Gaiman a writer's author, because I always walk away wanting to write more. That was not the case with this book, and it's not clear to me if I've just hit a point in my life where that is no longer the case or if it was the book. That being said, it did move quickly, and I had a good time reading it, it just didn't meet my expectations or my nostalgic memory of it. Still a good book! Just not as good as I remembered.

I listened to this on accident mostly, trying to find something to occupy myself in the middle of a migraine, but ooo boy is this story good. I think I prefer having listened to it, actually, than I would have reading the book--the performer (Bronson Pinchot) did an incredible job with all of the voices of the characters and the accents. That being said, I will probably have to look at this in physical book form to see the art, which I'm sure is beautiful.

The story gripped me pretty immediately, and the tone of the reading did that kind of interact-y way that MG books sometimes do without coming across as particularly patronizing or even annoying to my adult ears. Charlie was a pretty interesting main character and I can see kids really being drawn to him, and the world is just delightful. The class politics are a little all over the place (the Whiz Mob paint themselves initially as folks pursuing a kind of redistribution of wealth but that all rapidly falls apart) but it's not like I can super demand certain kinds of class politics from an MG book. The ending was a little difficult to listen to because it was so intense and while I had parts of it figured out, I felt like I had to sit through material I would have otherwise kind of skimmed past. But clearly I enjoyed this book, and I blew through it in a pretty fast time!

A really interesting book--Ford does a great job of tracing the movement of "soul style" across the diaspora, as well as focusing on its impact in the US specifically, I was a little disappointed by her engagement with the question of capitalism--she insisted that the women about whom she was writing were making choices and didn't dwell on the question of the commodification of style, which I understand and appreciated, but sometimes I felt like she was going too hard in the paint on the question of agency in a way that made me go "but what about...?" when I wouldn't have otherwise felt that way. (More focus on the self-fashioning chapter maybe would have helped with this? I don't know.) Still a really really compelling look at the ways in which the politics of style are critical to politics of liberation, and super accessible for teaching!

Just a really fascinating look, putting Black women and their organizing at the center, which I think really blows apart a lot of thinking around labor organizing and what it has looked like historically. My favorite chapter was the one about youth activism and the 'don't buy where you can't work' movement--just really fascinating stuff, and I think for me was the easiest to follow? (I read this in a less-than-desirable format so that had an impact, unfortunately, in how I was able to approach and understand what was going on--sometimes there were moving pieces I struggled to keep track of, for example.) Definitely usable in teaching, and so necessary in so many ways.

This was just such a good book--it moved at such a fast pace without feeling particularly dizzying, and the emotions were just so DEEP, it really dug down there. The plot came together in such a way where I was like yelling at Maggie by the end but also really deeply felt for her and was proud of her. It was just such a good book and I'm really really looking forward to reading the next one!

EDIT: The Diné Writers Collective has said they view this book as an appropriation of Diné culture. As a white settler, it is my responsibility to pay attention to nation specificity and not conflate a book written by a Native woman as a book written by a Diné woman, and to not pretend that representation is positive in all cases. You can view the Diné Writers Collective's statement about the book here: https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/opinion/trail-of-lightning-is-an-appropriation-of-din%C3%A9-cultural-beliefs-4tvSMvEfNE-i7AE10W7nQg/

I really really liked this; sometimes I find anthologies hard to follow, or feel jerked around by them, but this was such a smooth read with so many different great stories in it. The introductory texts didn't feel overwhelming or intrusive, but I still definitely felt like I was prepared to read the story. (It helps a lot, I think, that there weren't excerpts of chapters from books, or if there were, they were the first chapter so I didn't feel like I lost anything.) I don't know that any stood out to me as particularly exceptional, not because they blended together, but because each story really was so special and interesting in its own way.

I do want to note Junot Díaz is included in this collection, and his story does read much like the rest of his other works. Gwen Benaway has written about his piece in the New Yorker and I'll link to it here: https://www.flare.com/news/junot-diaz-abuse/.

I received a copy of this book through LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program, and I'm grateful to the publisher for the opportunity to read this book for review.

I would give this like a three and a half in reality; I think Stevenson has done some hard work to make this accessible, though the age range seems pretty wide (it's for 12+, but the language to me seems like it might be difficult for a twelve-year-old, even with the glossary at the back.)

I would say the limitations of this book are mostly the part of the choice to focus on abortion itself; though Stevenson does hit on reproductive justice at the end, and questions of sterilization are peppered throughout, the history she's able to tell is one that is fairly white. Supplementing this with works that focus more on reproductive justice, especially organizing around maybe Black Lives Matter and reproductive justice, might be useful.

(I also wish, selfishly, that the references were maybe more direct, especially for statistics. The numbers around people who can get pregnant who have died from botched abortions strike me as difficult to count, and that she could point me to more studies about where she got that information.)

She has done a good job of not staying too US or even US/Canada focused, though, and I really appreciated the chapter about the global fight for abortion. Similarly, the sections about young activists I think really have the potential to inspire youth who read the book. I would definitely recommend this book to parents with a younger teen, albeit with that supplemental material to make sure they have more information about reproductive justice than what Stevenson is able to provide here.

(Also I bet the art is going to be AMAZING in color; because my copy was an ARC, the art was in black and white which is kind of a bummer, but I'm sure it'll look great; it looked pretty good in black and white!)

So in writing a review for this, I should acknowledge the allegations against Alexie (which he says are correct,) and say that I believe the women who have come out with their stories. I also acknowledge the many critiques of Alexie's work surrounding alcoholism, the relationship to the reservation as a space, etc.

The stories themselves I think definitely align with those critiques of his work, which doesn't mean they're not compelling--he is a gifted storyteller (though obviously we have to consider the cost of his fame, especially over the women he's harassed,) and his voice is so strong in all the stories. I would recommend you read this and then maybe read a book by a Native woman, or several? Just use these stories as a jumping off point generally into the broader world of Native literature instead of returning again and again to Alexie.