An extremely cute start to a well-designed, brightly colored, whimsical adventure story. Cucumber is excited to move to a magical boarding school, he's all packed and ready to go.... when a letter from his father, Cabbage, arrives which urges him to set off on a quest instead. A evil queen has taken over the Cake Castle and plans to summon the Nightmare Knight, with an ultimate goal of world domination! Cucumber very reluctantly sets out to the castle and is immediately beset by side quest after side quest. Luckily his sword-fighting sister Almond shows up just in time to save him and take over the whole adventure for herself. The two of them and the cowardly Carrot travel from the Gumdrop forest to the Flatbread Flatlands to the Ripple kingdom chasing down one thing after another. I get the feeling the author probably studied animation- I think this would make a super cute children's TV show.

Please note, my low star rating is more a reflection of my tastes as a reader than the actual quality of this book. The story heavily features rape and suicidal ideation, two topics that often cause me to set a book aside. I'm glad I finished it though, because I am always curious about anything written by a nonbinary author. My favorite piece was actually an essay in the back in which the author reflected on the process of writing the book, which is told mainly from the POV of several god-spirits who are trapped in human form and wish to end their embodied experience to return to the god-realm. For these deities, the death of their human would be not a grief but a homecoming.

Schrieve's debut novel uses literal monstrosity as a metaphor for queerness to great effect. Z, a nonbinary teen, dies in the same car crash that kills the rest of their family, then wakes up undead. They are now legally a non-person, needing an adult guardian to sign on to the responsibility to incinerate their body when they begin to decompose and lose their sense of self. That is a terrifying eventuality, but in Z's immediate future is another problem: their only living relative hates monsters, and constantly calls Z by their deadname and uses she/her pronouns for them. Luckily, Z is able to escape to the care of their godmother, the widowed lesbian owner of Salem, Oregon's queer and pro-monster independent bookstore. At school Z slowly befriends Aysel, a Turkish-American lesbian werewolf, and Tommy, who everyone at school calls a fairy (as in, a descendant of the fey). After a local murder is attributed to unregistered werewolves the police begin to crack down harder on all magical people, brutalizing and destroying monster communities just trying to survive on the edge of homelessness. There's so much to love in this book- that experience of discovering that every single person in your friend group is queer, the anguished teenage feeling of being different in a way no one will understand, the willingness of the young to commit to life-altering magical/emotional oaths. If the claustrophobia and dysphoria of the opening scene make you wince, keep reading, I promise the book only gets richer and more surprising as you read.

This is an interesting and experimental book. The author wrote the first half of it in her late 20s after a hard breakup, burnout from activist work, wallowing in feelings of guilt about her part in the gentrification of New Orleans, and enraged over the recent Deepwater Horizon Gulf oil spill. She published the first half, intending to write the second half about a tragedy in her community which cost nine lives- though she didn't personally know any of those who passed away. Five years later the author wrote an alternate second half in which she speaks to her younger self about the depths of her own depression, white guilt, and the fact she doesn't really have the right to finish the book as initially planned. In other hands, this might feel like a cop-out, but I thought it was a compassionate way to honor the creative efforts of one's younger self, while also recognizing the flaws of the work, and the way that the world (and the author) changed over time.

Jazz Jennings is, in many ways, an extremely ordinary teenage girl. A whole chapter of this book relates her first crush and her first kiss; another talks about her love of mermaids and a summer project to make a water-usable mermaid tail; another is about fighting for her place on a local soccer team. There were a few times I paused the audio book to wonder, why am I listening to the autobiography of a 15 year old? But it is the very ordinariness of Jazz's life that makes her extraordinary. She came out publicly as transgender at the age of 6 and since then has been on many big stages- multiple appearance on Barbara Walters and Opera, speaking at conferences and colleges across the country, visiting the White House to shake hands with President Obama. She's done a lot for someone so young- I'm very curious to see what she does next.