Connell's mother is Marianne's mother's housekeeper. At school, the two pretend not to know each other, but in private, they develop an intense, uncategorizable relationship that extends past high school and through their college years.

What's there to say about NORMAL PEOPLE that hasn't already been said? It's an intensely frustrating book, but one I could not turn away from. Connell and Marianne both repeatedly made choices that were bad for themselves and the other person, and yet I wanted them to be together, fully. If they'd just had a real conversation - talked about their class differences, talked about their emotional traumas, talked about when they did and did not have feelings for each other - instead they talked around these things, making me want to shout, "go to couples therapy!"

Regardless, I loved how intricate their relationship was - layers on layers of years of knowing each other. They felt like real people trying to blindly find their way through life without real support networks. I also loved Connell's relationship with his mother, Lorraine. So rarely do we see male characters have one, let alone multiple complex relationships with women!

I get that all these things are also precisely the reasons why many people don't like this book. Somehow, though, it all clicked right into place for me.

Thanks to Dutton Books for the free copy of this book.

Fourteen year old Adunni lives in rural Nigeria. After her mother's unexpected death, her family runs out of money and Adunni's father sells her off to a marriage with an older man whose two existing wives have not given him sons. Adunni's mother always told her an education was the way out of a life of poverty and subservience, and she is determined to find her voice.

THE GIRL WITH THE LOUDING VOICE is a coming-of-age story of a girl who must fight for her girlhood and her adulthood. I loved Adunni immediately - she has a big personality and is impossible not to root for. She's up against so much and never loses sight of her goal of education, patriarchy be damned.

Some turns of the plot felt a bit too coincidental to me, a few too many things falling exactly into place to get us to the next step. Ultimately, though, Adunni was a compelling enough protagonist that I had to know what happened to her next.

Thanks to the author for the free advance copy of this book.

American journalist Milly Bennett has traveled the world for her stories. In the early 1930s, she decides to move to Moscow to report on the promise of socialism. In the midst of it, her young Russian husband is arrested, forcing her to examine her marriage and the Soviet Union more closely.

SALT THE SNOW is based on the life story of the real Milly Bennett, who was quite the trailblazing woman. I fell hard for her in this book - she's fast talking, swashbuckling, impulse driven, and most of all, just looking to find her place in the world with someone who loves her.

The story takes a turn around 70 pages in, but it's not on the jacket copy so I hate to give too much away. Suffice to say this is a story about a woman not only finding her own path, but looking deeply at her reasons for doing so, all while trying to balance her drive for honest reporting with trying to get work past Soviet censors to international audiences. Milly's life was full of choices, and while she herself wasn't always sure she was making the right ones, I was rooting for her the whole way.

Thanks to Atria Books for the free advance copy of this book.

Part memoir and part reimaginings of classic works, SOMETHING THAT MAY SHOCK AND DISCREDIT YOU is Daniel Lavery's exploration of his experience before, during, and after transitioning (note: the author has changed his name since I received this galley). The book ranges from straightforward (pardon the pun) pontificating on the mental stress of gender dysphoria to drawing on lessons from the Bible to imagining Sappho as a dirtbag teenager.

I've been following this author's writing for years and this, I think, is easily his best work yet. It's whip-smart and wildly funny, while also delving into deep, complex emotions. I think the most important thing about this book is all the digging into his mental state, particularly about the years he fought his desire to transition. As a culture, we by now have a pretty standard framework for what we understand the physical process of transitioning to be like for many binary trans people, but I can't think of any other work that looks so closely at the mental process. I imagine it will be a real gift for some readers to see themselves on the page here.

Many of the essays map a transmasculine experience onto the classics - Bible parables, Greek myths, The Golden Girls. Queer people search for themselves everywhere, in my experience. I also particularly appreciated the examination of not just the trauma a religious upbringing can inflict on a queer person, but also the comfort those stories can bring as well.

I did find by the second half of the book that things began to get repetitive, but each essay was still a delight, especially the ones that felt like classic-era Toast posts - I'll be laughing about the Lord Byron essay for months!