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tachyondecay
This review contains minor spoilers regarding some characterization but nothing about the end of the book itself.
Moving to a new school, for any reason, in one’s senior year can be tough, especially when that school is in a different town and involves living with a dad you haven’t seen in six years. In If I Was Your Girl, Amanda does exactly this. Amanda is transgender, and over the past few years she was bullied and then assaulted at her previous high school, subjected constantly to homophobic and transphobic language and actions. Over the past year she has been out of school and transitioning, and now she starts at Lambertville, finally presenting her gender the way she wants. As she attempts to acclimate to high school and all the attendant social pressures, Amanda must also decide how open she wants to be, and which people she wants in her life.
Perhaps a good word to describe much of this book would be tension. In her portrayal of Amanda’s move, Meredith Russo highlights how tense and guarded Amanda must be nearly 24 hours a day. She can’t even really be comfortable and relaxed around her father. There is a six-year wound that must be healed, and he is barely coping with her transition. Plus, as we learn through the flashbacks interspersed, Amanda’s father played an important role in rejecting her gender identification and enforcing masculinity. In school, even though no one knows her secret, Amanda’s back is constantly up. It would be even if she weren’t trans: she is a new person, and she is a new girl. Like, she’s in Lambertville High for less than a day before the boys come sniffing around like she’s a piece of fresh meat on display.
I’m still looking forward to reading more YA books that don’t feature a big honking dramatic romance, but hey, that’s not this book, and that’s OK. At least Grant, for what it is worth, is a refreshing break from the kinds of boys we often get as love interests. Like Amanda, he has a secret and keeps ghosting her or avoiding her. The secret is a real issue, though, not just a plot device. Again, the word here is tension: both of them have a secret, and as they each dance around the other’s secret, they have to evaluate their feelings.
I’d also like to point out how Grant consistently and emphatically understands consent and respects Amanda’s boundaries. And it’s not just that he always stops when Amanda hesitates or says she wants to slow down—though he does—but he actually, literally asks permission to kiss her. Not once but at least twice (I’m too lazy to flip through the book to check all the kisses), he says he wants to kiss her and then asks, “Is that okay?” Because as romantic and sexy as one person pushing their lips against another person without warning might seem in movies, obtaining enthusiastic consent is even sexier. Kudos to Russo for making this point throughout the novel.
Even as Amanda slowly warms to the possibility of having a romantic relationship despite her initial resolution just to keep her head down, she is also forming female friendships. I appreciate that Russo does not privilege romance over platonic friendship here. While Amanda/Grant is an important and essential plot, so too is Amanda’s friendship with Anna, Layla, and Chloe. When those girls pull over next to the overheating Amanda and essentially bundle her into their car, the cynical reader is expecting something Mean Girls-esque to go down. Instead, these three accept Amanda and become trustworthy companions. Russo uses each girl to expose Amanda to a different facet of life in Lambertville and life as an adolescent woman. Through Anna, we see the strict rules imposed by incredibly pious Baptist parents and understand that, as difficult as Amanda’s life has been up to this point, other people face comparable struggles and even more closed-minded homes. Layla is the mother hen of the group, constantly doling out encouragement and advice, whether it’s regarding Amanda’s choice of bra for gym or the dress she should wear to prom. And Amanda feels an affinity for Chloe in particular, who is a sporty lesbian somewhat wary of exploring her sexuality given Lambertville’s conservative atmosphere—although this leads to some conflict between the two girls as well.
The nature of conflict in If I Was Your Girl might be the strongest thing it has going. Chloe and Amanda are a good example of this, with the latter not realizing how her behaviour regarding Bee hurts Chloe. Similarly, Amanda and her dad have a kind of “cold war” going on throughout most of the book regarding her dating. It’s heartening to see that thaw out, albeit with a temporary setback near the end there. But perhaps the most intriguing conflict is the one that develops between Amanda and Bee, who from the beginning looks like Amanda’s best hope for a friend who will understand her.
I loved Bee’s reaction when Amanda tells Bee she is trans. Bee asks, “So what’s okay for me to ask?” This is a great first question. When the topic of trans people comes up in conversation with fellow cis people, the discussion too often turns towards the topic of genitals, surgery, etc. There is a voyeuristic fascination with this idea that “real trans people” need to somehow prove they’re trans by getting surgery. And even if a cis individual doesn’t believe that, equating transgender with gender confirmation surgery still reinforces this harmful notion. Similarly, the revelation that someone is trans does not entitle one to ask that person all sorts of intrusive questions. So Bee’s reaction, her attempt to let Amanda set the boundaries while also showing that she is open to learning (instead of making assumptions), is refreshing.
It’s so interesting, therefore, when Bee turns. I don’t want to go too much into it (I promised no major spoilers). But I like that the antagonists of If I Was Your Girl are never the ones you think they will be (except Parker—because duh). Russo’s characters are seldom one-dimensional: each has their own issues or struggles, with parents or school or whatnot; and each has their own lines of cleavage. Although what Bee does is itself reprehensible, I liked watching her come to this decision that her actions are justified, that Amanda, in choosing to embrace certain conventional aspects of femininity and female friendship, has betrayed not just Bee but her own self. Some of the best villains in literature are the ones who feel that they have been wronged and that their actions are righting that wrong.
For all of its positive points, there were certainly parts of this book that annoyed me or threw up speedbumps as I read. Can we talk for a moment about this whole “Bee and Amanda don’t have to go to art class because the teacher was injured?” Speaking as a teacher, I’m pretty sure that if I stopped turning up to work, my school would notice. They would then assign a substitute to my classes, or at the very least, check to see who is enrolled in my classes. And Bee and Amanda cannot be the only two students taking art from this teacher in the whole school. So how does the school administration not notice this issue until the gym teacher randomly chances upon them hanging out when they should be in class? Some readers might feel I’m making a mountain here, but this plot point really just threw me.
Amanda’s father’s reaction near the end of the novel, the whole, “Well, I’m going to defend my daughter’s honour the only way I know how!” also did little for me. It stood out to me as something quite stereotypical, even given the southern setting. I understand that Russo is trying to show us how, over the course of the story, Amanda’s father has slowly started to accept the idea that he has a daughter. Nevertheless, it seems like a very convenient plot device as compared to some of the more deft characterization.
In general, If I Was Your Girl just tends to move too fast in many places. There is precious little time to breathe in this book and take stock. This is not a long book, and it makes the school year seem remarkably short. I’m not saying it needs to be 500 pages—I don’t necessarily think it needs to be longer at all, yet as it is, sometimes the book feels more like a collection of Important Scenes rather than a full, rounded-out story.
Finally, I agree with some of the criticism around the portrayal of Amanda’s transition, particularly the fact that she exists within a very special storm of privileged circumstances. You’ll notice, however, that I haven’t really talked much about this aspect of the book. It is perhaps the most visible, certainly the most hyped aspect of If I Was Your Girl, and it is indubitably and important one. But it is not the only part of the novel, and I wanted to critique the whole book, not just the thing it is most known for. Additionally, because I am cisgender, it isn’t really my place to talk about how I feel about Russo’s portrayal of a trans person. I’d rather point you in the direction of trans reviewers: this blog post is a general list of reviews of trans/non-binary lit by trans/non-binary reviewers—scroll down to the If I Was Your Girl section; there are four as of my writing of this. Each brings a slightly different perspective, because, unsurprisingly, trans people are just as diverse and prone to disagreement as any other group of people.
Instead of opining on that topic, then, I’ll address my fellow cis readers and critics. If I Was Your Girl is a good book—it may even be a good book about transgender issues. It is laudable that an #ownvoices book with a trans protagonist is getting so much recognition. But the very fact that the author admits, in an author’s note designed specifically for this purpose, that she pretty much rigged Amanda to present as little of a barrier to cis people’s interaction with a trans character shows that we have such a long way to go. The popularity and profile of If I Was Your Girl is not a turning point of acceptance and representation of trans people in literature and is not a reason to pat ourselves on the back. The real turning point comes when books like this one are so ubiquitous, when portrayals of trans people are so diverse, that they become unremarkable, that “my main character is trans” is met by a “So? Yours and [lists a hundred other books].”
We have a lot of work to do. But reading If I Was Your Girl is definitely a good start.
Moving to a new school, for any reason, in one’s senior year can be tough, especially when that school is in a different town and involves living with a dad you haven’t seen in six years. In If I Was Your Girl, Amanda does exactly this. Amanda is transgender, and over the past few years she was bullied and then assaulted at her previous high school, subjected constantly to homophobic and transphobic language and actions. Over the past year she has been out of school and transitioning, and now she starts at Lambertville, finally presenting her gender the way she wants. As she attempts to acclimate to high school and all the attendant social pressures, Amanda must also decide how open she wants to be, and which people she wants in her life.
Perhaps a good word to describe much of this book would be tension. In her portrayal of Amanda’s move, Meredith Russo highlights how tense and guarded Amanda must be nearly 24 hours a day. She can’t even really be comfortable and relaxed around her father. There is a six-year wound that must be healed, and he is barely coping with her transition. Plus, as we learn through the flashbacks interspersed, Amanda’s father played an important role in rejecting her gender identification and enforcing masculinity. In school, even though no one knows her secret, Amanda’s back is constantly up. It would be even if she weren’t trans: she is a new person, and she is a new girl. Like, she’s in Lambertville High for less than a day before the boys come sniffing around like she’s a piece of fresh meat on display.
I’m still looking forward to reading more YA books that don’t feature a big honking dramatic romance, but hey, that’s not this book, and that’s OK. At least Grant, for what it is worth, is a refreshing break from the kinds of boys we often get as love interests. Like Amanda, he has a secret and keeps ghosting her or avoiding her. The secret is a real issue, though, not just a plot device. Again, the word here is tension: both of them have a secret, and as they each dance around the other’s secret, they have to evaluate their feelings.
I’d also like to point out how Grant consistently and emphatically understands consent and respects Amanda’s boundaries. And it’s not just that he always stops when Amanda hesitates or says she wants to slow down—though he does—but he actually, literally asks permission to kiss her. Not once but at least twice (I’m too lazy to flip through the book to check all the kisses), he says he wants to kiss her and then asks, “Is that okay?” Because as romantic and sexy as one person pushing their lips against another person without warning might seem in movies, obtaining enthusiastic consent is even sexier. Kudos to Russo for making this point throughout the novel.
Even as Amanda slowly warms to the possibility of having a romantic relationship despite her initial resolution just to keep her head down, she is also forming female friendships. I appreciate that Russo does not privilege romance over platonic friendship here. While Amanda/Grant is an important and essential plot, so too is Amanda’s friendship with Anna, Layla, and Chloe. When those girls pull over next to the overheating Amanda and essentially bundle her into their car, the cynical reader is expecting something Mean Girls-esque to go down. Instead, these three accept Amanda and become trustworthy companions. Russo uses each girl to expose Amanda to a different facet of life in Lambertville and life as an adolescent woman. Through Anna, we see the strict rules imposed by incredibly pious Baptist parents and understand that, as difficult as Amanda’s life has been up to this point, other people face comparable struggles and even more closed-minded homes. Layla is the mother hen of the group, constantly doling out encouragement and advice, whether it’s regarding Amanda’s choice of bra for gym or the dress she should wear to prom. And Amanda feels an affinity for Chloe in particular, who is a sporty lesbian somewhat wary of exploring her sexuality given Lambertville’s conservative atmosphere—although this leads to some conflict between the two girls as well.
The nature of conflict in If I Was Your Girl might be the strongest thing it has going. Chloe and Amanda are a good example of this, with the latter not realizing how her behaviour regarding Bee hurts Chloe. Similarly, Amanda and her dad have a kind of “cold war” going on throughout most of the book regarding her dating. It’s heartening to see that thaw out, albeit with a temporary setback near the end there. But perhaps the most intriguing conflict is the one that develops between Amanda and Bee, who from the beginning looks like Amanda’s best hope for a friend who will understand her.
I loved Bee’s reaction when Amanda tells Bee she is trans. Bee asks, “So what’s okay for me to ask?” This is a great first question. When the topic of trans people comes up in conversation with fellow cis people, the discussion too often turns towards the topic of genitals, surgery, etc. There is a voyeuristic fascination with this idea that “real trans people” need to somehow prove they’re trans by getting surgery. And even if a cis individual doesn’t believe that, equating transgender with gender confirmation surgery still reinforces this harmful notion. Similarly, the revelation that someone is trans does not entitle one to ask that person all sorts of intrusive questions. So Bee’s reaction, her attempt to let Amanda set the boundaries while also showing that she is open to learning (instead of making assumptions), is refreshing.
It’s so interesting, therefore, when Bee turns. I don’t want to go too much into it (I promised no major spoilers). But I like that the antagonists of If I Was Your Girl are never the ones you think they will be (except Parker—because duh). Russo’s characters are seldom one-dimensional: each has their own issues or struggles, with parents or school or whatnot; and each has their own lines of cleavage. Although what Bee does is itself reprehensible, I liked watching her come to this decision that her actions are justified, that Amanda, in choosing to embrace certain conventional aspects of femininity and female friendship, has betrayed not just Bee but her own self. Some of the best villains in literature are the ones who feel that they have been wronged and that their actions are righting that wrong.
For all of its positive points, there were certainly parts of this book that annoyed me or threw up speedbumps as I read. Can we talk for a moment about this whole “Bee and Amanda don’t have to go to art class because the teacher was injured?” Speaking as a teacher, I’m pretty sure that if I stopped turning up to work, my school would notice. They would then assign a substitute to my classes, or at the very least, check to see who is enrolled in my classes. And Bee and Amanda cannot be the only two students taking art from this teacher in the whole school. So how does the school administration not notice this issue until the gym teacher randomly chances upon them hanging out when they should be in class? Some readers might feel I’m making a mountain here, but this plot point really just threw me.
Amanda’s father’s reaction near the end of the novel, the whole, “Well, I’m going to defend my daughter’s honour the only way I know how!” also did little for me. It stood out to me as something quite stereotypical, even given the southern setting. I understand that Russo is trying to show us how, over the course of the story, Amanda’s father has slowly started to accept the idea that he has a daughter. Nevertheless, it seems like a very convenient plot device as compared to some of the more deft characterization.
In general, If I Was Your Girl just tends to move too fast in many places. There is precious little time to breathe in this book and take stock. This is not a long book, and it makes the school year seem remarkably short. I’m not saying it needs to be 500 pages—I don’t necessarily think it needs to be longer at all, yet as it is, sometimes the book feels more like a collection of Important Scenes rather than a full, rounded-out story.
Finally, I agree with some of the criticism around the portrayal of Amanda’s transition, particularly the fact that she exists within a very special storm of privileged circumstances. You’ll notice, however, that I haven’t really talked much about this aspect of the book. It is perhaps the most visible, certainly the most hyped aspect of If I Was Your Girl, and it is indubitably and important one. But it is not the only part of the novel, and I wanted to critique the whole book, not just the thing it is most known for. Additionally, because I am cisgender, it isn’t really my place to talk about how I feel about Russo’s portrayal of a trans person. I’d rather point you in the direction of trans reviewers: this blog post is a general list of reviews of trans/non-binary lit by trans/non-binary reviewers—scroll down to the If I Was Your Girl section; there are four as of my writing of this. Each brings a slightly different perspective, because, unsurprisingly, trans people are just as diverse and prone to disagreement as any other group of people.
Instead of opining on that topic, then, I’ll address my fellow cis readers and critics. If I Was Your Girl is a good book—it may even be a good book about transgender issues. It is laudable that an #ownvoices book with a trans protagonist is getting so much recognition. But the very fact that the author admits, in an author’s note designed specifically for this purpose, that she pretty much rigged Amanda to present as little of a barrier to cis people’s interaction with a trans character shows that we have such a long way to go. The popularity and profile of If I Was Your Girl is not a turning point of acceptance and representation of trans people in literature and is not a reason to pat ourselves on the back. The real turning point comes when books like this one are so ubiquitous, when portrayals of trans people are so diverse, that they become unremarkable, that “my main character is trans” is met by a “So? Yours and [lists a hundred other books].”
We have a lot of work to do. But reading If I Was Your Girl is definitely a good start.
Is there a name for the situation where you keep thinking you like a certain genre, but you’re almost unfailingly critical of every book in that genre you read? That’s me and the superhero novel. I want to like superhero novels, desperately. Superheroes fascinate me. But most superhero novels I’ve read don’t quite capture whatever ineffable quality of superheroics that I’m looking for. (To be fair, I also don’t read superhero comics or watch much superhero television/movies, Supergirl aside, so maybe I’m just delusional.) So I end up reading superhero novels and then feeling let down, and it’s not entirely the fault of those books.
Turns out that Dreadnought, by April Daniels, is the superhero novel I’ve been waiting for.
Small disclaimer the first: I applied and was approved for this book through NetGalley, but by the time the approval came through my pre-order copy of the book showed up, so I read the hard copy anyway. If you would like to send me free copies of books I’ve pre-ordered in time for me to read the physical copy anyway, hit me with up with a private message. I swear, one day I’ll figure out how to NetGalley properly.
Small disclaimer the second: I am cisgender, so my opinions are biased from that perspective. Here are some reviews by trans, non-binary, and multigender writers for your consideration: Nicole Field, Polenth Blake, Cheryl Morgan, Morgan Doherty, and Avery (thanks to this blog post for the heads up). They’ve given me some good food-for-thought regarding the explanations behind Danny’s transformation, and some problematic ableist moments, but have also reaffirmed my conclusion that this is a kickass superhero novel with a fantastic sense of humour.
So Danny Tozer is a transgender girl who is hiding her identity from her family (and everyone else), barely surviving by expressing herself by painting her toenails in secret. Dreadnought, arguably the world’s most powerful superhero—superheroes are just a thing in this universe—dies in front of her, and she inherits his “mantle” of powers. In addition to giving Danny superpowers, the mantle also transforms her body so that it matches her internal gender identity. You can imagine that her family isn’t too thrilled about this, and while Danny is ecstatic by the change, it has numerous consequences she spends the rest of the novel learning to deal with.
I was looking forward to Dreadnought just from the description (which is what motivated me to pre-order the book just after finding out about it). I didn’t expect it to be so funny. It’s Daniels’ humour that first made me suspect I’d be giving this book five stars:
I don’t visualize things when I read, right? So long, florid descriptions of characters and scenes and battle sequences leave little impression on me. But snappy dialogue between Danny and Doc Impossible? Yes, please! I’ll take me some more of that.
The thing is, this humour is a necessary tonic to what might otherwise be interpreted as an often bleak, very difficult read for someone who has gone through experiences similar to Danny’s. On the one hand, you have Doc Impossible, who is supportive and intersectional as shit:
On the other hand, there are numerous characters who represent that difficulty of existing as an openly trans person, even one who has superpowers. Danny constantly gets misgendered, from her family to her best friend to another superhero, Graywytch, who is a strident TERF from the get-go. Dreadnought comes about as close as I can possibly get to understanding how the constant microagression of misgendering can be wearing and debilitating for someone. And Daniels makes it clear that even though Danny lucked out and side-stepped the whole transition quandary and now also has superpowers, none of this solves the institutional transphobia of our society.
Indeed, Daniels portrays the whole “teenager suddenly finds herself with near-invincible superpowers” extremely … well, realistic is not the correct word—believably, I guess? In the world of Dreadnought, people with powers (metahumans, is the term) are actually fairly common, though only a small proportion of them have the juice and desire to become “capes”. Inheriting the Dreadnought mantle pretty much guarantees Danny a spot at the cape table—when she turns eighteen. Until then, she gets stuck in the kiddie zone—and she does not like that at all. So after being told not to go caping on the side, you better believe that’s exactly what she does. Teenagers, eh?
There are times when I groaned a little at the way Danny and Sarah handled their independent little investigation. Sometimes it seems like they make choices simply because it is better for the plot that way. Still, I very much enjoyed the relationship between Danny and Sarah. I can appreciate how Daniels characterizes Danny not just as trans but a lesbian, and that her feelings for Sarah are a complicated mixture of admiration, awe, and attraction—but I’m also glad that Daniels resists the urge to make this anywhere near a straightforward romance. Danny has enough going as it is to mix love into the equation.
Danny and Sarah are great, though. I love the backstory Daniels gives Sarah, and that Sarah (who is Black) calls Danny out on her white privilege even while being supportive of her trans identity. Sarah provides essential emotional support, rooting for Danny to take on the name as well as the mantle of Dreadnought—but she is also hotheaded, impulsive, too quick to action; Danny offers a great, more contemplative counterbalance. This dynamic works really well, and I can’t wait to see what happens with them in the next book.
Really, the relationships between Danny and most of the characters in this book are just so good. Take her parents, for instance. In addition to being transphobic, Danny’s father is just outright abusive. He promotes an unrealistic standard of macho/hyper-masculinity that Danny can’t conform to, even if she were a boy. Transgender issues aside, this is a household that is not a safe or nurturing environment for any kid. And Danny’s mom, while much less overt, is not any more supportive. I hit page 187, and my heart pretty much broke:
There is so much to unpack here. The pain, and the anger, and the way once again Danny has to restrain herself from letting it break to the surface now that she has so much strength. This exchange really drives home something we cisgender people often forget about the experience of being transgender, namely, that the constant misgendering, erasure, and transphobia is literally killing transgender people. Moreover, this quote, and similar moments throughout the book, drive home the self-doubt and misplaced guilt that Danny herself feels about her gender identity. She has internalized a lot of her parents’ disappointment in her gender expression, and while she has no intention of reversing what the Dreadnought mantle has wrought, it doesn’t change her lived experience. I know that some people, both trans and cis, have pointed out the handwaving convenience of Danny’s transition into literally a Superhot Superwoman, and they have a point. That being said, Daniels doesn’t miss a chance to remind us that this doesn’t magically take away Danny’s pain.
So far I’ve just been talking about the characters in this book and not so much about the superhero plot. Keep in mind that Dreadnought is less than 300 pages—there is a lot of character development going on here for a slim book!
The superhero story is no less impressive than the characterization. As I alluded to above, Danny strikes out on her own while mulling over how much of a superhero she actually wants to be, and whether she can affiliate herself with the Legion Pacifica when they talk down to her and host a TERF. She and Sarah go after Utopia, murderer of the previous Dreadnought, together. The way Daniels works this plot in parallel to Danny’s adjustment to her changes in her plainclothes life is quite deft. There’s some good investigation here, combined with plenty of action. Daniels is careful not to make Danny too overpowered, and I love the descriptions of how Danny sees/uses Dreadnought’s abilities. The disagreements that Danny and Sarah have regarding the best ways to proceed are nice philosophical diversions, too.
And then we hit the climax, and the rest of this book is just explosive.
Danny takes on some challenging bad guys and engages in her first real, big Dreadnought-level challenge. And then she goes to the Legion Tower, and without spoiling anything, let’s just say that Daniels manages to utterly devastate us. I kind of predicted a few of the twists, thanks I’ll say to foreshadowing much earlier in the book, but some of them were new. And the level of … carnage … is impressive. If you’re thinking about reading this book but are holding off only because you want to know if it contains a nail-biting, race-against-the-clock, down-to-the-wire finale … then yes, yes it does.
So buckle up, because this book starts off strong and just keeps getting better. Seriously, after the intense climax, the last two pages still manage to beat that for pure emotional drama. Let’s just say that Danny pulls a Tony Stark in Iron Man, and it’s more of a Crowning Moment of Awesome than anything else she does in this entire book—and that includes saving an airplane single-handedly or, you know, saving the whole world from a cyborg supervillain with delusions of godhead.
Dreadnought is a debut novel. It’s not perfect. But it’s finally a superhero novel I can not only enjoy but adore. My major criticism is that it is too short, and that having read it so soon after its release I now have to wait far too long to read the sequel. I can’t wait to learn what Daniels has next in store for Danny, Sarah, the Doc, et al, both in terms of the threat of Nemesis and Danny’s newfound fame. Because this is not just a positive portrayal of a transgender lesbian superhero who saves the world, but it’s just the beginning. And I can only hope there are teens out there who read this and see that they, too, can be heroes.
My reviews of the Nemesis series:
Sovereign →
Turns out that Dreadnought, by April Daniels, is the superhero novel I’ve been waiting for.
Small disclaimer the first: I applied and was approved for this book through NetGalley, but by the time the approval came through my pre-order copy of the book showed up, so I read the hard copy anyway. If you would like to send me free copies of books I’ve pre-ordered in time for me to read the physical copy anyway, hit me with up with a private message. I swear, one day I’ll figure out how to NetGalley properly.
Small disclaimer the second: I am cisgender, so my opinions are biased from that perspective. Here are some reviews by trans, non-binary, and multigender writers for your consideration: Nicole Field, Polenth Blake, Cheryl Morgan, Morgan Doherty, and Avery (thanks to this blog post for the heads up). They’ve given me some good food-for-thought regarding the explanations behind Danny’s transformation, and some problematic ableist moments, but have also reaffirmed my conclusion that this is a kickass superhero novel with a fantastic sense of humour.
So Danny Tozer is a transgender girl who is hiding her identity from her family (and everyone else), barely surviving by expressing herself by painting her toenails in secret. Dreadnought, arguably the world’s most powerful superhero—superheroes are just a thing in this universe—dies in front of her, and she inherits his “mantle” of powers. In addition to giving Danny superpowers, the mantle also transforms her body so that it matches her internal gender identity. You can imagine that her family isn’t too thrilled about this, and while Danny is ecstatic by the change, it has numerous consequences she spends the rest of the novel learning to deal with.
I was looking forward to Dreadnought just from the description (which is what motivated me to pre-order the book just after finding out about it). I didn’t expect it to be so funny. It’s Daniels’ humour that first made me suspect I’d be giving this book five stars:
“What’s this?”
“A suppository.”
“No.”
“Shove that up your butt.”
“No.”
“It’s for science.”
“No.”
“Please?”
“You are going to buy me pizza.”
“Deal.”
“A lot of pizza.”
I don’t visualize things when I read, right? So long, florid descriptions of characters and scenes and battle sequences leave little impression on me. But snappy dialogue between Danny and Doc Impossible? Yes, please! I’ll take me some more of that.
The thing is, this humour is a necessary tonic to what might otherwise be interpreted as an often bleak, very difficult read for someone who has gone through experiences similar to Danny’s. On the one hand, you have Doc Impossible, who is supportive and intersectional as shit:
“I guess I just thought I was finally a real girl.”
“Hey! None of that!” She takes me by the shoulders. “You think it’s a uterus that makes a woman? Bullshit. You feel like you’re a girl, you live it, it’s part of you? Then you’re a girl. That’s the end of it, no quibbling. You’re as real a girl as anyone. An you really need to learn to express your anger better.”
On the other hand, there are numerous characters who represent that difficulty of existing as an openly trans person, even one who has superpowers. Danny constantly gets misgendered, from her family to her best friend to another superhero, Graywytch, who is a strident TERF from the get-go. Dreadnought comes about as close as I can possibly get to understanding how the constant microagression of misgendering can be wearing and debilitating for someone. And Daniels makes it clear that even though Danny lucked out and side-stepped the whole transition quandary and now also has superpowers, none of this solves the institutional transphobia of our society.
Indeed, Daniels portrays the whole “teenager suddenly finds herself with near-invincible superpowers” extremely … well, realistic is not the correct word—believably, I guess? In the world of Dreadnought, people with powers (metahumans, is the term) are actually fairly common, though only a small proportion of them have the juice and desire to become “capes”. Inheriting the Dreadnought mantle pretty much guarantees Danny a spot at the cape table—when she turns eighteen. Until then, she gets stuck in the kiddie zone—and she does not like that at all. So after being told not to go caping on the side, you better believe that’s exactly what she does. Teenagers, eh?
There are times when I groaned a little at the way Danny and Sarah handled their independent little investigation. Sometimes it seems like they make choices simply because it is better for the plot that way. Still, I very much enjoyed the relationship between Danny and Sarah. I can appreciate how Daniels characterizes Danny not just as trans but a lesbian, and that her feelings for Sarah are a complicated mixture of admiration, awe, and attraction—but I’m also glad that Daniels resists the urge to make this anywhere near a straightforward romance. Danny has enough going as it is to mix love into the equation.
Danny and Sarah are great, though. I love the backstory Daniels gives Sarah, and that Sarah (who is Black) calls Danny out on her white privilege even while being supportive of her trans identity. Sarah provides essential emotional support, rooting for Danny to take on the name as well as the mantle of Dreadnought—but she is also hotheaded, impulsive, too quick to action; Danny offers a great, more contemplative counterbalance. This dynamic works really well, and I can’t wait to see what happens with them in the next book.
Really, the relationships between Danny and most of the characters in this book are just so good. Take her parents, for instance. In addition to being transphobic, Danny’s father is just outright abusive. He promotes an unrealistic standard of macho/hyper-masculinity that Danny can’t conform to, even if she were a boy. Transgender issues aside, this is a household that is not a safe or nurturing environment for any kid. And Danny’s mom, while much less overt, is not any more supportive. I hit page 187, and my heart pretty much broke:
Mom leans back in her chair. "It wasn't so bad, was it? You were growing up so well."
"It was torture! You know what I was doing when Dreadnought--when that supervillain attacked me?" I don't believe it. It's like she's wilfully misunderstanding it. They never take my word for it; why can't they take my word for it? "I was painting my toenails behind the mall because that's the only way I could keep sane. Does that seem normal to you, Mom? Does that seem healthy?"
"I just ... I don't see you as a girl," she says. "Even now, even looking like that. You were going to be such a fine young--"
"I was going to die." The pencil snaps between my fingers, one end cartwheeling off across the table and onto the floor. "And I am a girl. Even if you don't see it."
There is so much to unpack here. The pain, and the anger, and the way once again Danny has to restrain herself from letting it break to the surface now that she has so much strength. This exchange really drives home something we cisgender people often forget about the experience of being transgender, namely, that the constant misgendering, erasure, and transphobia is literally killing transgender people. Moreover, this quote, and similar moments throughout the book, drive home the self-doubt and misplaced guilt that Danny herself feels about her gender identity. She has internalized a lot of her parents’ disappointment in her gender expression, and while she has no intention of reversing what the Dreadnought mantle has wrought, it doesn’t change her lived experience. I know that some people, both trans and cis, have pointed out the handwaving convenience of Danny’s transition into literally a Superhot Superwoman, and they have a point. That being said, Daniels doesn’t miss a chance to remind us that this doesn’t magically take away Danny’s pain.
So far I’ve just been talking about the characters in this book and not so much about the superhero plot. Keep in mind that Dreadnought is less than 300 pages—there is a lot of character development going on here for a slim book!
The superhero story is no less impressive than the characterization. As I alluded to above, Danny strikes out on her own while mulling over how much of a superhero she actually wants to be, and whether she can affiliate herself with the Legion Pacifica when they talk down to her and host a TERF. She and Sarah go after Utopia, murderer of the previous Dreadnought, together. The way Daniels works this plot in parallel to Danny’s adjustment to her changes in her plainclothes life is quite deft. There’s some good investigation here, combined with plenty of action. Daniels is careful not to make Danny too overpowered, and I love the descriptions of how Danny sees/uses Dreadnought’s abilities. The disagreements that Danny and Sarah have regarding the best ways to proceed are nice philosophical diversions, too.
And then we hit the climax, and the rest of this book is just explosive.
Danny takes on some challenging bad guys and engages in her first real, big Dreadnought-level challenge. And then she goes to the Legion Tower, and without spoiling anything, let’s just say that Daniels manages to utterly devastate us. I kind of predicted a few of the twists, thanks I’ll say to foreshadowing much earlier in the book, but some of them were new. And the level of … carnage … is impressive. If you’re thinking about reading this book but are holding off only because you want to know if it contains a nail-biting, race-against-the-clock, down-to-the-wire finale … then yes, yes it does.
So buckle up, because this book starts off strong and just keeps getting better. Seriously, after the intense climax, the last two pages still manage to beat that for pure emotional drama. Let’s just say that Danny pulls a Tony Stark in Iron Man, and it’s more of a Crowning Moment of Awesome than anything else she does in this entire book—and that includes saving an airplane single-handedly or, you know, saving the whole world from a cyborg supervillain with delusions of godhead.
Dreadnought is a debut novel. It’s not perfect. But it’s finally a superhero novel I can not only enjoy but adore. My major criticism is that it is too short, and that having read it so soon after its release I now have to wait far too long to read the sequel. I can’t wait to learn what Daniels has next in store for Danny, Sarah, the Doc, et al, both in terms of the threat of Nemesis and Danny’s newfound fame. Because this is not just a positive portrayal of a transgender lesbian superhero who saves the world, but it’s just the beginning. And I can only hope there are teens out there who read this and see that they, too, can be heroes.
My reviews of the Nemesis series:
Sovereign →
April Daniels might single-handedly be restoring my faith in superhero fiction.
Spoilers for the first book but not this one, unless you think revealing that Graywytch is still a massive problem for Danny is a spoiler, in which case … oops. Keep reading, then? :P
I love the idea of superhero fiction, but most of the actual superhero novels I’ve read so far have been underwhelming at best. It turns out that this is a subgenre quite difficult to pull off, in terms of plot and characterization. I tend to cite Vanessa Torline’s “#TrainFightTuesday” as my gold standard for what I’d like my superhero fiction to be: fast-paced and genre-savvy yet also cutting and compassionate. With Dreadnought, Daniels fulfilled most of these requirements, plus she did it with a teenage trans lesbian protagonist. So I pre-ordered Sovereign and, although moving into my very own house was a good distraction, waited eagerly for it to arrive days after its release (so far Chapters is beating Amazon at this pre-order game). That was your warning, by the way, that I’m a head-over-heels fan of this series and it’s seriously colouring my critical gaze.
Daniels does a great job clearing the first hurdle with a sequel: how to catch up new readers without forcing existing fans to sit through chapters of “as you know, Bob” exposition. Sovereign drops nuggets of information about Danny’s genesis in Dreadnought and her ultimate conflict with Utopia throughout the novel. It opens with Danny going to a bi-annual cape convention in Antarctica (!!!), where she muses a lot on how the past few months have changed everything for her. Soon, though, her time at the convention is cut short and she has to make a quick orbital hop (!!) back to New Port to save the day and show the readers what it means to be Dreadnought.
You get just enough information to help you make sense of Danny’s immediate situation—she’s Dreadnought, transgender, and had a trial-by-fire in the last book that led to her learning about a cloud of exotic matter called Nemesis that might be problematic in the future. Other relevant details, such as Danny’s relationships with Doc Impossible and Sarah/Calamity, or the fact that she is a minor and in a legal battle to escape her abusive parents, emerge naturally over the course of the book. It seldom feels forced—sometimes Danny’s internal monologue can get a little too explainy, but I can rationalize this as her just nerding out so much over superheroes and superpowers, etc.
Sovereign, even more so than the first book, really showcases how much work Daniels has put in to reifying a world where some humans have superpowers. And I’m not just talking about how she explains the origins of superpowers, with just enough handwaving to make it fun but not so much it becomes too silly—I’m talking about how a society with superpowered humans would have to adjust its practices. Whitecapes worry about getting licenses and bystander insurance. Entire industries have sprung up around the idea of superheroes (and supervillains), industries that cater to the capes themselves or to the people affected by them. Daniels doesn’t just give us a “what if this world plus superpowers”; she delivers a “what if this were a world with superpowers”. There’s a moment later on in the book where Danny mentions something, just sort of offhandedly, but it kind of blows my mind in an oooohh-of-course-it-would-work-like-that kind of way. (Can I remember what that is now, over a week later? No. That’s why you need to write your reviews right after you finish the book, Ben.)
Daniels also steps up her plot game here. That’s not to dis Dreadnought, which has a pretty bombastic plot. But there are even more moving parts here, and in general, I also think the pacing has improved. We get a massive climactic battle sequence that would look so good in the movie or TV adaptation (cough, ahem)—but then the book still isn’t over, because wait, there’s a second plot for Danny to foil! This kind of bait-and-switch can easily backfire, but it works here because Daniels foreshadows it for basically the entire book, so it isn’t all that surprising.
Although Sovereign contains a hefty dose of the same humour I loved in the first book, it also deals with very heavy issues. Doc Impossible is not doing well after Utopia hijacked her. And Danny loves the power that being Dreadnought gives her, loves fighting the blackcapes—loves it, in fact, too much. She knows this, but she also can’t stop—not when there is a city to protect. Nevertheless, the power of Dreadnought can’t help her with media relations, the fight to emancipate herself from her parents, or her relationship with Sarah. In the time elapsed between books, Danny and Sarah drifted apart as the former shoulders the caping load of the defunct League and the latter recovers from losing an arm and adjusts to using a prosthesis. Sovereign, in many ways, is about how these two figure out their relationship now that both are veteran capes instead of wannabes playing at the gig.
There are so many other excellent character moments I’d love to mention. Suffice it to say, Daniels makes sure the minor characters get a chance to shine too.
Graywytch is back as a principal antagonist, and in a big, big, big way. Although the stakes are great for this, both on a personal level and for the world at large, Graywytch herself might be my least favourite part of this series. She is just so one-dimensional in her TERFiness. Like, it is absolutely chilling to read her characterization and see the way she twists and misrepresents everything Danny is. But there is no grey-ness to Graywytch’s character. Villains might be Daniels’ biggest weakness, in my opinion, because neither the other antagonist (the eponymous Sovereign) nor the previous book’s Utopia impressed me all that much. In all three cases, Daniels creates amazing existential crises for Danny et al to resolve, but the people she puts on the face of these crises are not as interesting or complex.
Fortunately, these are anomalies in a book that is otherwise deep and impressive on so many levels. It shouldn’t be a big deal that the main character is a trans woman (but I guess it is). What’s more important is how Daniels navigates the expectations that might surface because of the lack of representation. Very early in the book, Danny is quick to acknowledge that she still has a lot of privileges as a result of her skin colour, conventional attractiveness, and the immediate cachet of the Dreadnought mantle. She does this while letting us in a little fuck-up of hers:
Yes, Sovereign includes a supporting character who is a non-binary superhero with they/them pronouns! And although the above passage also serves to deepen the world of capes and show us Danny’s fallibility, being new to this all, Daniels is very intentionally acknowledging that, while trans women suffer oppression and visibility issues, trans people of colour, and non-binary trans people, are marginalized and erased in ways that white trans people don’t experience.
Danny’s flaws, her impulsiveness and aggression, are a core part of my enjoyment of this series. A superhero is only as good as their weaknesses—and I’m not talking about Dreadnought’s susceptibility to electricity. It’s tempting to excuse a lot of Danny’s mistakes on her youth, or on how growing up in a negligent and abusive environment has affected her temperament, but it’s so much more than that. It’s how being Dreadnought is changing her, how the stress of the job is changing her, and how her own unease over her changes is … well, changing her. Basically, what I’m trying to say is that for a book with an awful lot of fight scenes and superheroics, there is also a fair amount of introspection.
Danny Tozer is an awesome protagonist (I will fight you IRL), but it’s her interactions with the rest of the cast that really sells this book. The dialogue is so witty, and the relationship drama is just one gut punch after another. There’s a scene towards the end between Danny and Doc Impossible, who is struggling with alcoholism, and it is the culmination of everything that went on for the rest of the book, and I just teared up.
Sovereign is everything Dreadnought was and better. It punts “middle book syndrome” into orbit and then watches it burn up in re-entry. I loved the ending. I think it’s perfect. It’s gutsy, with that much carnage and devastation—but when you are writing your own superhero series, why not go big? This isn’t a shared universe! And, most importantly, it leaves me wanting more. So much more. I would read another ten books, easy (no pressure, April); Danny is Harry-Dresden levels of fun for me. But I’ll settle for a third book in a year or so (*puppy dog eyes*).
My reviews of the Nemesis series:
← Dreadnought
Spoilers for the first book but not this one, unless you think revealing that Graywytch is still a massive problem for Danny is a spoiler, in which case … oops. Keep reading, then? :P
I love the idea of superhero fiction, but most of the actual superhero novels I’ve read so far have been underwhelming at best. It turns out that this is a subgenre quite difficult to pull off, in terms of plot and characterization. I tend to cite Vanessa Torline’s “#TrainFightTuesday” as my gold standard for what I’d like my superhero fiction to be: fast-paced and genre-savvy yet also cutting and compassionate. With Dreadnought, Daniels fulfilled most of these requirements, plus she did it with a teenage trans lesbian protagonist. So I pre-ordered Sovereign and, although moving into my very own house was a good distraction, waited eagerly for it to arrive days after its release (so far Chapters is beating Amazon at this pre-order game). That was your warning, by the way, that I’m a head-over-heels fan of this series and it’s seriously colouring my critical gaze.
Daniels does a great job clearing the first hurdle with a sequel: how to catch up new readers without forcing existing fans to sit through chapters of “as you know, Bob” exposition. Sovereign drops nuggets of information about Danny’s genesis in Dreadnought and her ultimate conflict with Utopia throughout the novel. It opens with Danny going to a bi-annual cape convention in Antarctica (!!!), where she muses a lot on how the past few months have changed everything for her. Soon, though, her time at the convention is cut short and she has to make a quick orbital hop (!!) back to New Port to save the day and show the readers what it means to be Dreadnought.
You get just enough information to help you make sense of Danny’s immediate situation—she’s Dreadnought, transgender, and had a trial-by-fire in the last book that led to her learning about a cloud of exotic matter called Nemesis that might be problematic in the future. Other relevant details, such as Danny’s relationships with Doc Impossible and Sarah/Calamity, or the fact that she is a minor and in a legal battle to escape her abusive parents, emerge naturally over the course of the book. It seldom feels forced—sometimes Danny’s internal monologue can get a little too explainy, but I can rationalize this as her just nerding out so much over superheroes and superpowers, etc.
Sovereign, even more so than the first book, really showcases how much work Daniels has put in to reifying a world where some humans have superpowers. And I’m not just talking about how she explains the origins of superpowers, with just enough handwaving to make it fun but not so much it becomes too silly—I’m talking about how a society with superpowered humans would have to adjust its practices. Whitecapes worry about getting licenses and bystander insurance. Entire industries have sprung up around the idea of superheroes (and supervillains), industries that cater to the capes themselves or to the people affected by them. Daniels doesn’t just give us a “what if this world plus superpowers”; she delivers a “what if this were a world with superpowers”. There’s a moment later on in the book where Danny mentions something, just sort of offhandedly, but it kind of blows my mind in an oooohh-of-course-it-would-work-like-that kind of way. (Can I remember what that is now, over a week later? No. That’s why you need to write your reviews right after you finish the book, Ben.)
Daniels also steps up her plot game here. That’s not to dis Dreadnought, which has a pretty bombastic plot. But there are even more moving parts here, and in general, I also think the pacing has improved. We get a massive climactic battle sequence that would look so good in the movie or TV adaptation (cough, ahem)—but then the book still isn’t over, because wait, there’s a second plot for Danny to foil! This kind of bait-and-switch can easily backfire, but it works here because Daniels foreshadows it for basically the entire book, so it isn’t all that surprising.
Although Sovereign contains a hefty dose of the same humour I loved in the first book, it also deals with very heavy issues. Doc Impossible is not doing well after Utopia hijacked her. And Danny loves the power that being Dreadnought gives her, loves fighting the blackcapes—loves it, in fact, too much. She knows this, but she also can’t stop—not when there is a city to protect. Nevertheless, the power of Dreadnought can’t help her with media relations, the fight to emancipate herself from her parents, or her relationship with Sarah. In the time elapsed between books, Danny and Sarah drifted apart as the former shoulders the caping load of the defunct League and the latter recovers from losing an arm and adjusts to using a prosthesis. Sovereign, in many ways, is about how these two figure out their relationship now that both are veteran capes instead of wannabes playing at the gig.
There are so many other excellent character moments I’d love to mention. Suffice it to say, Daniels makes sure the minor characters get a chance to shine too.
Graywytch is back as a principal antagonist, and in a big, big, big way. Although the stakes are great for this, both on a personal level and for the world at large, Graywytch herself might be my least favourite part of this series. She is just so one-dimensional in her TERFiness. Like, it is absolutely chilling to read her characterization and see the way she twists and misrepresents everything Danny is. But there is no grey-ness to Graywytch’s character. Villains might be Daniels’ biggest weakness, in my opinion, because neither the other antagonist (the eponymous Sovereign) nor the previous book’s Utopia impressed me all that much. In all three cases, Daniels creates amazing existential crises for Danny et al to resolve, but the people she puts on the face of these crises are not as interesting or complex.
Fortunately, these are anomalies in a book that is otherwise deep and impressive on so many levels. It shouldn’t be a big deal that the main character is a trans woman (but I guess it is). What’s more important is how Daniels navigates the expectations that might surface because of the lack of representation. Very early in the book, Danny is quick to acknowledge that she still has a lot of privileges as a result of her skin colour, conventional attractiveness, and the immediate cachet of the Dreadnought mantle. She does this while letting us in a little fuck-up of hers:
Being genderqueer is hard. Being Iranian-American is hard. Being a superhero without a steady paying gig is also hard. Kinetiq had been swimming upstream for years to be all of those at the same time, and the credit for what should have been their big breakthrough, their first headlining victory, ended up getting handed to me by default. Why? Because I’m a pretty white girl with an easy-to-understand narrative.
Yes, Sovereign includes a supporting character who is a non-binary superhero with they/them pronouns! And although the above passage also serves to deepen the world of capes and show us Danny’s fallibility, being new to this all, Daniels is very intentionally acknowledging that, while trans women suffer oppression and visibility issues, trans people of colour, and non-binary trans people, are marginalized and erased in ways that white trans people don’t experience.
Danny’s flaws, her impulsiveness and aggression, are a core part of my enjoyment of this series. A superhero is only as good as their weaknesses—and I’m not talking about Dreadnought’s susceptibility to electricity. It’s tempting to excuse a lot of Danny’s mistakes on her youth, or on how growing up in a negligent and abusive environment has affected her temperament, but it’s so much more than that. It’s how being Dreadnought is changing her, how the stress of the job is changing her, and how her own unease over her changes is … well, changing her. Basically, what I’m trying to say is that for a book with an awful lot of fight scenes and superheroics, there is also a fair amount of introspection.
Danny Tozer is an awesome protagonist (I will fight you IRL), but it’s her interactions with the rest of the cast that really sells this book. The dialogue is so witty, and the relationship drama is just one gut punch after another. There’s a scene towards the end between Danny and Doc Impossible, who is struggling with alcoholism, and it is the culmination of everything that went on for the rest of the book, and I just teared up.
Sovereign is everything Dreadnought was and better. It punts “middle book syndrome” into orbit and then watches it burn up in re-entry. I loved the ending. I think it’s perfect. It’s gutsy, with that much carnage and devastation—but when you are writing your own superhero series, why not go big? This isn’t a shared universe! And, most importantly, it leaves me wanting more. So much more. I would read another ten books, easy (no pressure, April); Danny is Harry-Dresden levels of fun for me. But I’ll settle for a third book in a year or so (*puppy dog eyes*).
My reviews of the Nemesis series:
← Dreadnought
I very quickly decided I did not like Jill McTeague very much. In fact, my dislike of her was exceeded only by my dislike of her mother (but we’ll get to that). I thought Jill was shallow, rude, and selfish in the way she handles her monthly transformation into Jack.
And I was right.
And that’s one reason why Cycler is a powerful book. Although Jill is one of the protagonists and one of the people undergoing this unique experience, this does not automatically make her a better, more understanding person. Her unique perspective doesn’t automatically make her more accepting of Tommy’s bisexuality. Her reaction to notes from Jack asking for more porn isn’t “Oh, that poor boy who is stuck in my room, all alone, for the four days a month he is allowed to exist.” It’s “Eww, porn, boys are gross.”
By portraying Jill as a … shall we say, an unenlightened teenage girl, Lauren McLaughlin creates a more fulfilling story arc for Cycler. Jill is both victim and complicit (in Jack’s suffering). The problems she faces—trying to get a date for prom, Jack’s appearances coming more frequently and less predictably, her poor reaction to Tommy telling her that he’s bi … these are all important problems to her. Because they are normal problems, and Jill, like most teenagers, has the idea that she wants to be normal. Despite the fact that she is a walking metaphor for “no one is normal,” Jill rejects Jack as an aberration and does everything she can to negate him—as the mantra “I am all girl,” literally the first line of the novel, indicates. Jill isn’t all girl, as Jack demonstrates.
Giving Jack his own voice is McLaughlin’s second stroke of genius. The sense of desperation and mounting existential crisis that he communicates is very moving. At first, it’s difficult to grasp the extent to which Jill and her family have fucked up here … but after a couple of Jack chapters, it is obvious that we have gone far down a rabbithole of twisted abuse.
But it’s all for Jill’s own good, right?
The only person I liked less than Jill was Jill’s mother. I can forgive Jill her faults—partly because they are very much a product of her mother’s influence, mixed with the questionable upbringing provided by American media…. While I can understand and sympathize with the plight that has driven Jill’s mother to these extremes, I can’t bring myself to forgive her the behaviour. Unfortunately, Jill’s mother represents an all-too-common type of parent portrayed—sometimes championed, sometimes mocked, sometimes deconstructed—in media. She doesn’t want her child to be special; she wants her child to be normal—and so help them, if that means breaking them, she will do it.
Arguably the full-on creepiness of Jill’s mom’s obsession is apparent in the lockdown they put Jack into later in the book. For me, however, the most creepy moment is probably when they go wig shopping. The determination that Jill ascribes to her mother’s epic search for the right wig to disguise the “damage” that Jack wrought to Jill and Jack’s hair is deep. Deeply deep, even, to borrow a turn of phrase from Jill and her friends. As we see more and more evidence of the way Jill’s mother views Jack as an unhealthy parasite rather than, you know, her child, it’s easier to understand why she is so set on delivering to Jill as “ordinary” an American teenage girl experience as possible. Even if that means wigs and tranquilizers and locking Jill up for four days like a werewolf.
(Can I just say that it sucks that Jill turns into a dude for four days a month and still gets her period and she doesn’t get any superpowers to boot.)
But really, of course, Jill’s mom is just the representative in this microcosm of how most of our society views gender as a binary and a normative concept. You are punished if you step outside of either of these boxes. Jill’s mother is more interested in ensuring her child stays inside the boxes. And it’s an understandable perspective, as I mentioned, because she’s concerned for how society might judge her child for deviating from these norms. I just wish she had the courage to recognize that, in protecting her child, she is harming her child too.
Now, the young adult audience reading Cycler is not necessarily going to have the language to talk about these things like I am now. That’s an artifact of my ivory tower days and, you know, reading lots of books. But I’d like to think that books like this one help adolescents think more about these issues, and about the assumptions that they themselves make when it comes to gender. McLaughlin highlights this in how Jill, Ramie, and Daria discuss Tommy’s bisexuality. And again, this is where Jill not being perfect is really useful: as a flawed protagonist, she is easier to identify with. We can see a character who, like us, makes mistakes and has prejudices when it comes to gender and sexuality … and we can see her being challenged, overcoming those prejudices, and becoming a better person. Flawed characters are valuable because we are flawed readers.
I also like how the premise that McLaughlin uses here has connotations beyond gender that feed back into our stereotypes about gender. Obviously there is the whole parallel with menstruation—monthly cycle, lasts three or four days, onset at puberty, etc. And, as I alluded to earlier, it’s comparable to a monthly curse like lycanthropy: every full moon, Jill becomes a monster … a teenage boy! Get it? Because boys are monstrous from a teenage girl point of view?
What this taps into, of course, is this idea of Othering the things we are not. Jill transforms monthly into the Other, a boy, something she could not possibly understand. McLaughlin emphasizes this through the language that both Jill and her mother use, the stereotypical “boys are so weird” lines. Where do girls and women first hear those? From parents. From adults. From school.
The thing is, we aren’t all that different. Or at least, if we are different, are we not also similar? After all, everyone poops. Therein lies another pernicious danger of the gender binary. It’s one thing to accept that some people want to perform gender differently from how it was assigned to them at birth. Tt’s another thing to follow this to the logical conclusion that gender boxes themselves become an increasingly tenuous concept. But I’ll argue that you can’t support rigid gender roles and still be supportive of people who perform gender in a non-cisgender way.
(I’ll point out that 2009!me might not have thought this far—I know 2008!me certainly didn’t, because at that point I was still shaky on this idea that gender is entirely a social construct. Yay for changing and learning!)
So much of the cultural activities we engage in reinforce these stereotypical binaries, though. From prom to sex ed to celebrations of matrimony and childbirth, there is an emphasis on separating and Othering the genders. But this is so harmful, because Othering leads to alienation, which leads to the fear and hate that then becomes misogyny, prejudice, and structural oppression.
But I digress.
I digress because Cycler is really good at hitting the notes required to make people think about these things. Jill’s experience is both atypical and science-fictional—she is not, it’s important to stress, an example of someone realizing that their gender doesn’t coincide with the one they were assigned at birth. In Jill’s case, her sex is quite literally changing in a physical, biochemical way—and, consequently, over the years Jill’s personality has bifurcated into another person who performs gender as a man. Whether she can come to accept herself for who she is and achieve the synthesis her dad advises remains to be seen. Alas, my library does not have Recycler, and it’s not actually available from Chapters, so I had to resort to the Amazon marketplace to find a copy. But it’s on its way, because I want to find out! (I don’t hear great things from the Goodreads reviews, alas … but I live in hope.)
I put this book on my to-read list in 2009, back when the sequel came out, but I never got around to reading it until now. In the past six years, my understanding of gender issues has changed and deepened, so my perspective on Cycler is very different from what 2009!me would have thought of it. I was much closer to the target audience back then, of course. Would past!me have liked this as much as I do now? I would like to think so.
And as I mentioned already, I don’t think you need the knowledge and language I have to understand, appreciate, or talk about the issues in this book. Instead, it’s a great way to get that conversation started and get young people thinking about gender. As a lover of reading, and now as an educator and especially an English teacher, I’m trying to read more YA literature so I know what to recommend to students. This goes on the “definitely recommend” pile.
And I was right.
And that’s one reason why Cycler is a powerful book. Although Jill is one of the protagonists and one of the people undergoing this unique experience, this does not automatically make her a better, more understanding person. Her unique perspective doesn’t automatically make her more accepting of Tommy’s bisexuality. Her reaction to notes from Jack asking for more porn isn’t “Oh, that poor boy who is stuck in my room, all alone, for the four days a month he is allowed to exist.” It’s “Eww, porn, boys are gross.”
By portraying Jill as a … shall we say, an unenlightened teenage girl, Lauren McLaughlin creates a more fulfilling story arc for Cycler. Jill is both victim and complicit (in Jack’s suffering). The problems she faces—trying to get a date for prom, Jack’s appearances coming more frequently and less predictably, her poor reaction to Tommy telling her that he’s bi … these are all important problems to her. Because they are normal problems, and Jill, like most teenagers, has the idea that she wants to be normal. Despite the fact that she is a walking metaphor for “no one is normal,” Jill rejects Jack as an aberration and does everything she can to negate him—as the mantra “I am all girl,” literally the first line of the novel, indicates. Jill isn’t all girl, as Jack demonstrates.
Giving Jack his own voice is McLaughlin’s second stroke of genius. The sense of desperation and mounting existential crisis that he communicates is very moving. At first, it’s difficult to grasp the extent to which Jill and her family have fucked up here … but after a couple of Jack chapters, it is obvious that we have gone far down a rabbithole of twisted abuse.
But it’s all for Jill’s own good, right?
The only person I liked less than Jill was Jill’s mother. I can forgive Jill her faults—partly because they are very much a product of her mother’s influence, mixed with the questionable upbringing provided by American media…. While I can understand and sympathize with the plight that has driven Jill’s mother to these extremes, I can’t bring myself to forgive her the behaviour. Unfortunately, Jill’s mother represents an all-too-common type of parent portrayed—sometimes championed, sometimes mocked, sometimes deconstructed—in media. She doesn’t want her child to be special; she wants her child to be normal—and so help them, if that means breaking them, she will do it.
Arguably the full-on creepiness of Jill’s mom’s obsession is apparent in the lockdown they put Jack into later in the book. For me, however, the most creepy moment is probably when they go wig shopping. The determination that Jill ascribes to her mother’s epic search for the right wig to disguise the “damage” that Jack wrought to Jill and Jack’s hair is deep. Deeply deep, even, to borrow a turn of phrase from Jill and her friends. As we see more and more evidence of the way Jill’s mother views Jack as an unhealthy parasite rather than, you know, her child, it’s easier to understand why she is so set on delivering to Jill as “ordinary” an American teenage girl experience as possible. Even if that means wigs and tranquilizers and locking Jill up for four days like a werewolf.
(Can I just say that it sucks that Jill turns into a dude for four days a month and still gets her period and she doesn’t get any superpowers to boot.)
But really, of course, Jill’s mom is just the representative in this microcosm of how most of our society views gender as a binary and a normative concept. You are punished if you step outside of either of these boxes. Jill’s mother is more interested in ensuring her child stays inside the boxes. And it’s an understandable perspective, as I mentioned, because she’s concerned for how society might judge her child for deviating from these norms. I just wish she had the courage to recognize that, in protecting her child, she is harming her child too.
Now, the young adult audience reading Cycler is not necessarily going to have the language to talk about these things like I am now. That’s an artifact of my ivory tower days and, you know, reading lots of books. But I’d like to think that books like this one help adolescents think more about these issues, and about the assumptions that they themselves make when it comes to gender. McLaughlin highlights this in how Jill, Ramie, and Daria discuss Tommy’s bisexuality. And again, this is where Jill not being perfect is really useful: as a flawed protagonist, she is easier to identify with. We can see a character who, like us, makes mistakes and has prejudices when it comes to gender and sexuality … and we can see her being challenged, overcoming those prejudices, and becoming a better person. Flawed characters are valuable because we are flawed readers.
I also like how the premise that McLaughlin uses here has connotations beyond gender that feed back into our stereotypes about gender. Obviously there is the whole parallel with menstruation—monthly cycle, lasts three or four days, onset at puberty, etc. And, as I alluded to earlier, it’s comparable to a monthly curse like lycanthropy: every full moon, Jill becomes a monster … a teenage boy! Get it? Because boys are monstrous from a teenage girl point of view?
What this taps into, of course, is this idea of Othering the things we are not. Jill transforms monthly into the Other, a boy, something she could not possibly understand. McLaughlin emphasizes this through the language that both Jill and her mother use, the stereotypical “boys are so weird” lines. Where do girls and women first hear those? From parents. From adults. From school.
The thing is, we aren’t all that different. Or at least, if we are different, are we not also similar? After all, everyone poops. Therein lies another pernicious danger of the gender binary. It’s one thing to accept that some people want to perform gender differently from how it was assigned to them at birth. Tt’s another thing to follow this to the logical conclusion that gender boxes themselves become an increasingly tenuous concept. But I’ll argue that you can’t support rigid gender roles and still be supportive of people who perform gender in a non-cisgender way.
(I’ll point out that 2009!me might not have thought this far—I know 2008!me certainly didn’t, because at that point I was still shaky on this idea that gender is entirely a social construct. Yay for changing and learning!)
So much of the cultural activities we engage in reinforce these stereotypical binaries, though. From prom to sex ed to celebrations of matrimony and childbirth, there is an emphasis on separating and Othering the genders. But this is so harmful, because Othering leads to alienation, which leads to the fear and hate that then becomes misogyny, prejudice, and structural oppression.
But I digress.
I digress because Cycler is really good at hitting the notes required to make people think about these things. Jill’s experience is both atypical and science-fictional—she is not, it’s important to stress, an example of someone realizing that their gender doesn’t coincide with the one they were assigned at birth. In Jill’s case, her sex is quite literally changing in a physical, biochemical way—and, consequently, over the years Jill’s personality has bifurcated into another person who performs gender as a man. Whether she can come to accept herself for who she is and achieve the synthesis her dad advises remains to be seen. Alas, my library does not have Recycler, and it’s not actually available from Chapters, so I had to resort to the Amazon marketplace to find a copy. But it’s on its way, because I want to find out! (I don’t hear great things from the Goodreads reviews, alas … but I live in hope.)
I put this book on my to-read list in 2009, back when the sequel came out, but I never got around to reading it until now. In the past six years, my understanding of gender issues has changed and deepened, so my perspective on Cycler is very different from what 2009!me would have thought of it. I was much closer to the target audience back then, of course. Would past!me have liked this as much as I do now? I would like to think so.
And as I mentioned already, I don’t think you need the knowledge and language I have to understand, appreciate, or talk about the issues in this book. Instead, it’s a great way to get that conversation started and get young people thinking about gender. As a lover of reading, and now as an educator and especially an English teacher, I’m trying to read more YA literature so I know what to recommend to students. This goes on the “definitely recommend” pile.
Lizard Radio is a lovely, messy, very queer book with queer characters. I enjoyed it and also didn’t, if you know what I mean—I’m glad I read it, but reading it was a bit of a chore, because Pat Schmatz’s style is quite distinctive. This feels more like a novella than a novel to me, despite its length, because it doesn’t quite have the narrative completeness I desire, personally, in my novels. Nevertheless, Kivali’s journey is extremely interesting and powerful—and especially for teens who are questioning their gender, sexuality, or place in this world, I can see how this would be an important book.
Kivali is new to Crop Camp. This is a school-like program that teaches you agricultural basics, although in reality it’s an indoctrination camp for the conformist ideals of SayFree Gov. Lizard Radio takes place in a vague and hazy future in which a corporate-like government controls an unspecified region of the world. Gender expression and indeed everything else is heavily policed, and as we eventually discover, even harsher measures are being taken to prevent people from getting too emotional about everything. In short, this is definitely a dystopia—but it’s the grey, washed out dystopia of a world that doesn’t remember it surrendered its freedom rather than the brutalist blackened dystopia of a world chafing beneath the authoritarian boot.
I like the arc of Kivali’s journey and the way Schmatz doesn’t give Kivali the easy ways out. Kivali is initially resistant to Crop Camp but, beyond all expectations, actually kind of likes it. So that makes rebelling all that much harder once she realizes beyond all shadow of a doubt that she isn’t down for the fascism Ms. Mischetti peddles. Mischetti asks, “Are you a leader or a follower?” and this question pursues Kivali throughout Lizard Radio. The mystery of her origins aside, Kivali must confront her gender and sexuality (she appears to be questioning in both cases, identifying perhaps more as male but not comfortable with the idea of transitioning in the way that SayFree would like), as well as how she relates to the others at Crop Camp.
One of the most potent themes in this book is the portrayal of binaries. In this dystopia, transgender people (benders) not only can transition but must. That is, genderqueer identities are recognized but only if they can be subsumed into the accepted binary. There is no room for non-binary, agender, or non-conforming people: you can be a boy who transitions into a girl, or vice versa, but after you’ve done that you must conform to your gender role. If you don’t, you might end up in the Blight—the city that the government exiles non-conforming individuals to. I found this treatment fascinating because so often it seems like this is the limited tolerance of trans people that many so-called allies gently advocate for: yes, by all means, transition, but don’t make waves. Don’t be visibly trans. We don’t want to talk about benders.
Schmatz questions the usefulness of binaries. Kivali is special as a protagonist because her mysterious origins allow her the freedom to dream that she is something, anything, other than what she is. Kivali is an interesting protagonist because she lacks the pre-conceived notions of her own limitations that others like Sully have of themselves. This power allows her to grow and morph and rise to the occasion, even if it also makes her vulnerable to the subtle manipulations and machinations of Ms. Mischetti.
Mischetti is a wonderful antagonist, because she is truly committed to the cause. She believes that the fascism of SayFree is justified because it keeps the peace. She doesn’t always like what she has to do, but she believes in the greater good. These types of villains are often the best, for their self-righteousness creates the conditions of their own downfall even as they ruthlessly stand against the protagonist: there is no reasoning with Ms. Mischetti; she is a fanatic. (To be honest, the predictable reveal at the end—which I won’t spoil—did nothing for me. It rang very hollow and felt unnecessary, because Kivali and Mischetti were already so connected. Oh well.)
Lizard Radio feels disjointed in its narration and storytelling. I can only assume that was intentional. That being said, I still didn’t enjoy it that much, and it’s the main reason I’m not gushing over this book! It just wasn’t quite the style of narrative I wanted right now.
Kivali is new to Crop Camp. This is a school-like program that teaches you agricultural basics, although in reality it’s an indoctrination camp for the conformist ideals of SayFree Gov. Lizard Radio takes place in a vague and hazy future in which a corporate-like government controls an unspecified region of the world. Gender expression and indeed everything else is heavily policed, and as we eventually discover, even harsher measures are being taken to prevent people from getting too emotional about everything. In short, this is definitely a dystopia—but it’s the grey, washed out dystopia of a world that doesn’t remember it surrendered its freedom rather than the brutalist blackened dystopia of a world chafing beneath the authoritarian boot.
I like the arc of Kivali’s journey and the way Schmatz doesn’t give Kivali the easy ways out. Kivali is initially resistant to Crop Camp but, beyond all expectations, actually kind of likes it. So that makes rebelling all that much harder once she realizes beyond all shadow of a doubt that she isn’t down for the fascism Ms. Mischetti peddles. Mischetti asks, “Are you a leader or a follower?” and this question pursues Kivali throughout Lizard Radio. The mystery of her origins aside, Kivali must confront her gender and sexuality (she appears to be questioning in both cases, identifying perhaps more as male but not comfortable with the idea of transitioning in the way that SayFree would like), as well as how she relates to the others at Crop Camp.
One of the most potent themes in this book is the portrayal of binaries. In this dystopia, transgender people (benders) not only can transition but must. That is, genderqueer identities are recognized but only if they can be subsumed into the accepted binary. There is no room for non-binary, agender, or non-conforming people: you can be a boy who transitions into a girl, or vice versa, but after you’ve done that you must conform to your gender role. If you don’t, you might end up in the Blight—the city that the government exiles non-conforming individuals to. I found this treatment fascinating because so often it seems like this is the limited tolerance of trans people that many so-called allies gently advocate for: yes, by all means, transition, but don’t make waves. Don’t be visibly trans. We don’t want to talk about benders.
Schmatz questions the usefulness of binaries. Kivali is special as a protagonist because her mysterious origins allow her the freedom to dream that she is something, anything, other than what she is. Kivali is an interesting protagonist because she lacks the pre-conceived notions of her own limitations that others like Sully have of themselves. This power allows her to grow and morph and rise to the occasion, even if it also makes her vulnerable to the subtle manipulations and machinations of Ms. Mischetti.
Mischetti is a wonderful antagonist, because she is truly committed to the cause. She believes that the fascism of SayFree is justified because it keeps the peace. She doesn’t always like what she has to do, but she believes in the greater good. These types of villains are often the best, for their self-righteousness creates the conditions of their own downfall even as they ruthlessly stand against the protagonist: there is no reasoning with Ms. Mischetti; she is a fanatic. (To be honest, the predictable reveal at the end—which I won’t spoil—did nothing for me. It rang very hollow and felt unnecessary, because Kivali and Mischetti were already so connected. Oh well.)
Lizard Radio feels disjointed in its narration and storytelling. I can only assume that was intentional. That being said, I still didn’t enjoy it that much, and it’s the main reason I’m not gushing over this book! It just wasn’t quite the style of narrative I wanted right now.
This is the book on transgender rights, gender identity and expression, and policy that you never knew you wanted.
Welcome to the latest instalment of “$#A$^% am I ever behind at reviewing my NetGalley books”. Today I review Beyond Trans: Does Gender Matter?, out at the beginning of June from New York University Press. To summarize Heath Fogg Davis’ thesis in one sentence in his own words: “I show why it is in the best interests of organizations of all kinds to minimize their administration of sex”. What follows is a careful, methodical, logical, but heartfelt analysis of specific areas of Western society in which categorization, segregation, or discrimination on the basis of sex/gender is, in Davis’ opinion, unnecessary. Moreover, Davis goes beyond pointing out problems and actually suggests practical, workable solutions that involve breaking down gender barriers and gender binaries rather than—as he phrases it—using assimilation and accommodation to fit trans people into those binaries.
Before we go on, a quick disclaimer:I am cis (Update 3 years in the future—life comes at you pretty fast, turns out I am not cis. Still, I wrote this review back when I thought I was.) and so can only review this book from that perspective. I can’t tell you if it provides a good representation of the views of various trans people. Davis himself is a trans man. Also, I appreciate how he quotes a variety of transgender and non-binary people, not all of whom necessarily share his views; Davis is careful not to represent trans communities as monolithic in their desires or views on gender. Finally, Davis acknowledges that while he has experienced the oppression, marginalization, and fear that comes with being transgender, he also has privileges of class, and he does not appear “visibly” transgender, so he has male privilege that he did not have prior to his transition.
Beyond Trans is not actually as controversial as some of the marketing might make it seem. I was a little wary because of the title and the first lines of the description. Was Davis going to make some kind of argument about how gender doesn’t matter, how we should all be blind? No—if anything, it’s the opposite. Davis says that your gender matters, and that it matters so much to your identity that the government and other organizations should stop policing it in silly, contradictory, unenforceable ways.
Really, libertarians should be all about this book. (Disclaimer: I am not a libertarian either, so I guess I shouldn’t speak for them.) It always amuses me how there is this overlap, at least in the States, between people who call for smaller government and people who want the government to legislate what people can do with regards to their sexual and gender orientations and identities. Much of Davis’ argument is classically libertarian: the government has no business regulating sex and gender. Indeed, one of Davis’ chief criticisms of government regulation is its inconsistent and often absent definition of sex or gender. Various laws and regulations just use these words, often interchangeably, without offering proper legal definitions, leaving it up to the courts to decide what was actually meant by the law.
Davis also points out that existing attempts to be inclusive have major shortcomings. He cites, for example, the movements to add “other” categories to the sex checkboxes on many official forms. It’s well-intentioned and better than nothing, but it also creates confusion. Ultimately, he argues the collection of sex/gender information from people happens in situations where it is entirely irrelevant. For gender-conforming individuals, this isn’t a big deal; we don’t get called on it. For non-conforming people, though, it puts amazing power in the hands of administrative authority that can, in some cases, lead to violence.
I used the terms “gender-conforming/non-conforming” for a reason, because Davis asserts that the superfluous collection of and segregation by gender harms cis people as well as trans people. He gives the example of a lesbian woman kicked out of a New York restaurant for using the women’s washroom: the bouncer didn’t believe she was a woman. Since her gender expression didn’t conform to his personal beliefs for what matches “woman” in our society, he felt it was within his power to police her gender and her access to essential facilities.
Along the same lines, Davis points out that the strategy to accommodate and assimilate trans people essentially erases non-binary people, agender people, etc. It’s all well and good to let a trans person change their sex on official documents from male to female or vice versa—but what about people who want to change from male to … nothing? Or female to non-binary, genderqueer, genderfluid, neutrois, or so on? Amendments and improvements to laws that focus on removing the barrier to changing one’s sex within the existing binaries can’t fix the fact that the entire idea of a sex or gender binary is itself a flawed and broken one and should be demolished post-haste.
Beyond Trans looks at sex markers on official documents, sex-segregated washrooms, single-sex admissions policies at colleges, and sex-segregated sports. In each case, Davis examines why these policies are harmful, unnecessary, and ill-advised. He then suggests how to fix them, whether it involves dismantling them altogether or going a different route. He emphasizes how this approach doesn’t just benefit trans people or gender non-conforming people but everyone. For example, on the subject of sex-segregated washrooms, he points out that “bathroom bills” as they are so-called in the United States cannot possibly accomplish their purported goals, because truly dangerous people will follow someone into a washroom no matter what the sign on the door says. More open-plan washrooms, with floor-to-ceiling individual stalls, would be a huge step forward in both safety and gender inclusiveness.
Later, when addressing sex-segregated sports, Davis unpacks the contradictory approaches to policing men’s and women’s sports. There is a greater emphasis, he argues, on “catching” men who are “pretending” to be women to gain an unfair advantage, whereas few people seem as concerned about women masquerading as men. He points out how this “trans misogyny” is in fact harmful to society at large: “this kind of misogyny is an extension of the general assumption that ‘femaleness and femininity are inferior to, and exist primarily for the benefit of, maleness and masculinity’.”
I love this. And this is why my feminism will always include trans people, and why my feminism will always fight for trans women to be treated as the real women they are. Drawing a line in the sand is not only arbitrary but damaging and harmful in the very way that people drawing that line are often themselves oppressed and marginalized. Why inflict that on another?
In case you can’t tell from my effusive encomium of the arguments in Beyond Trans, I loved this book. I can’t think of a single criticism of it, except perhaps that it is very focused on American society and policy. Yet a much broader survey would probably be very long, and I also appreciate that this book is short. Even so, it manages to accomplish a lot in this brief length: multiple case studies, and an appendix with practical suggestions for companies who want to do a “gender audit” on their policies.
Last time I requested a book from NetGalley on trans issues I got burned, badly. Beyond Trans is a salve to that burn: it’s #ownvoices, acknowledges diverse points of view, and has impeccable logical, ethical, and moral arguments. This is an academic book, with all sorts of great references and sources—but Davis’ style is very accessible and easy for a layperson to read. If you are interested in gender, or particularly gender and its intersections with social policy, I highly recommend this book. It will get you thinking.
Welcome to the latest instalment of “$#A$^% am I ever behind at reviewing my NetGalley books”. Today I review Beyond Trans: Does Gender Matter?, out at the beginning of June from New York University Press. To summarize Heath Fogg Davis’ thesis in one sentence in his own words: “I show why it is in the best interests of organizations of all kinds to minimize their administration of sex”. What follows is a careful, methodical, logical, but heartfelt analysis of specific areas of Western society in which categorization, segregation, or discrimination on the basis of sex/gender is, in Davis’ opinion, unnecessary. Moreover, Davis goes beyond pointing out problems and actually suggests practical, workable solutions that involve breaking down gender barriers and gender binaries rather than—as he phrases it—using assimilation and accommodation to fit trans people into those binaries.
Before we go on, a quick disclaimer:
Beyond Trans is not actually as controversial as some of the marketing might make it seem. I was a little wary because of the title and the first lines of the description. Was Davis going to make some kind of argument about how gender doesn’t matter, how we should all be blind? No—if anything, it’s the opposite. Davis says that your gender matters, and that it matters so much to your identity that the government and other organizations should stop policing it in silly, contradictory, unenforceable ways.
Really, libertarians should be all about this book. (Disclaimer: I am not a libertarian either, so I guess I shouldn’t speak for them.) It always amuses me how there is this overlap, at least in the States, between people who call for smaller government and people who want the government to legislate what people can do with regards to their sexual and gender orientations and identities. Much of Davis’ argument is classically libertarian: the government has no business regulating sex and gender. Indeed, one of Davis’ chief criticisms of government regulation is its inconsistent and often absent definition of sex or gender. Various laws and regulations just use these words, often interchangeably, without offering proper legal definitions, leaving it up to the courts to decide what was actually meant by the law.
Davis also points out that existing attempts to be inclusive have major shortcomings. He cites, for example, the movements to add “other” categories to the sex checkboxes on many official forms. It’s well-intentioned and better than nothing, but it also creates confusion. Ultimately, he argues the collection of sex/gender information from people happens in situations where it is entirely irrelevant. For gender-conforming individuals, this isn’t a big deal; we don’t get called on it. For non-conforming people, though, it puts amazing power in the hands of administrative authority that can, in some cases, lead to violence.
I used the terms “gender-conforming/non-conforming” for a reason, because Davis asserts that the superfluous collection of and segregation by gender harms cis people as well as trans people. He gives the example of a lesbian woman kicked out of a New York restaurant for using the women’s washroom: the bouncer didn’t believe she was a woman. Since her gender expression didn’t conform to his personal beliefs for what matches “woman” in our society, he felt it was within his power to police her gender and her access to essential facilities.
Along the same lines, Davis points out that the strategy to accommodate and assimilate trans people essentially erases non-binary people, agender people, etc. It’s all well and good to let a trans person change their sex on official documents from male to female or vice versa—but what about people who want to change from male to … nothing? Or female to non-binary, genderqueer, genderfluid, neutrois, or so on? Amendments and improvements to laws that focus on removing the barrier to changing one’s sex within the existing binaries can’t fix the fact that the entire idea of a sex or gender binary is itself a flawed and broken one and should be demolished post-haste.
Beyond Trans looks at sex markers on official documents, sex-segregated washrooms, single-sex admissions policies at colleges, and sex-segregated sports. In each case, Davis examines why these policies are harmful, unnecessary, and ill-advised. He then suggests how to fix them, whether it involves dismantling them altogether or going a different route. He emphasizes how this approach doesn’t just benefit trans people or gender non-conforming people but everyone. For example, on the subject of sex-segregated washrooms, he points out that “bathroom bills” as they are so-called in the United States cannot possibly accomplish their purported goals, because truly dangerous people will follow someone into a washroom no matter what the sign on the door says. More open-plan washrooms, with floor-to-ceiling individual stalls, would be a huge step forward in both safety and gender inclusiveness.
Later, when addressing sex-segregated sports, Davis unpacks the contradictory approaches to policing men’s and women’s sports. There is a greater emphasis, he argues, on “catching” men who are “pretending” to be women to gain an unfair advantage, whereas few people seem as concerned about women masquerading as men. He points out how this “trans misogyny” is in fact harmful to society at large: “this kind of misogyny is an extension of the general assumption that ‘femaleness and femininity are inferior to, and exist primarily for the benefit of, maleness and masculinity’.”
I love this. And this is why my feminism will always include trans people, and why my feminism will always fight for trans women to be treated as the real women they are. Drawing a line in the sand is not only arbitrary but damaging and harmful in the very way that people drawing that line are often themselves oppressed and marginalized. Why inflict that on another?
In case you can’t tell from my effusive encomium of the arguments in Beyond Trans, I loved this book. I can’t think of a single criticism of it, except perhaps that it is very focused on American society and policy. Yet a much broader survey would probably be very long, and I also appreciate that this book is short. Even so, it manages to accomplish a lot in this brief length: multiple case studies, and an appendix with practical suggestions for companies who want to do a “gender audit” on their policies.
Last time I requested a book from NetGalley on trans issues I got burned, badly. Beyond Trans is a salve to that burn: it’s #ownvoices, acknowledges diverse points of view, and has impeccable logical, ethical, and moral arguments. This is an academic book, with all sorts of great references and sources—but Davis’ style is very accessible and easy for a layperson to read. If you are interested in gender, or particularly gender and its intersections with social policy, I highly recommend this book. It will get you thinking.
The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure
Constance Penley, Mireille Miller-Young, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Tristan Taormino
“My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit.”
This powerful statement, first deployed and used in this essay by Flavia Dzodan, is often on my mind. And I choose to open my review of The Feminist Porn Book with it, because that is how I want to position myself. As a white person, I recognize I have a hell of a lot of privilege in our society. So it is imperative that I remember the importance of intersectionality, and that I work hard not to let my feminist thoughts and statements inadvertently support other systems of oppression.
I choose to open my review of The Feminist Porn Book with this statement, because sex work is a nexus of intersectionality. Sex work requires us to interact with sexism and misogyny, with transphobia and homopobia, with racism and abelism, and with capitalist exploitation. We must engage with all of these issues; we must be intersectional when discussing sex work. So it can’t even be as simple as being “pro” sex work or “anti” sex work or pornography. The issue is far more nuanced than that, and that’s why I picked up this book.
If you want a one-sentence summary: The Feminist Porn Book is a collection of scholarly and personal essays about feminism and porn from people who study, produce, direct, or perform in pornography. Many of the essays are highly academic, both in tone and language and in the sense that they are rigorously cited with endnotes. Many of the essays come from people who have spent most of their adult lives behind of or in front of the camera, directly engaging with pornography and with their own complex feelings about the medium and how it relates with feminist movements. Although certain common themes run throughout some of the essays, and the editors have grouped them largely into four broad topics, each essay is its own revelation given the author’s unique experiences, perspective, and opinions.
This is a diverse book, for the most part. There are cis and trans voices, abled and disabled voices, Black and brown and white voices, straight and queer voices, etc. There are certainly some voices missing from the conversation—in their introduction, the authors admit that this volume focuses on the porn industry of the West: “…for feminist porn to be a global project, more work would need to be done to include non-Western scholars and pornographers in the conversation”. Yet I think it is a good sign of the diversity of this collection that not all of the essays line up behind a single ideology of feminist porn. Or, as the introduction states: “Throughout the book, we explore the multiple definitions of feminist porn, but we refuse to fix its boundaries.” Certainly there are aspects of some essays I didn’t agree with or would critique, others that are oppositional to each other but that I don’t yet have an opinion on, one way or the other. That’s awesome. This is a book that makes you think and question.
The first part of the book provides a bit of history into the emergence of feminist porn. The first essay is an excerpt from Betty Dodson’s memoir. This is one piece that I found both fascinating and occasionally frustrating, for Dodson throws off little nuggets like, “Most men are hardwired to have multiple sex partners…” that set my skeptical-of-evolutionary-psychology-and-gender-essentialism alarm bells ringing. By and large, however, this part of the book is very eye-opening for a younger reader like myself. As someone who came of age online, it’s hard to understand what it would have been like to live in a world that did not have constant, immediate access to porn. I mean, these days it is hard to avoid even with your safe search filter on. I know, in theory, that there existed a time of the porno videotape and the hard copy porno mag, etc.—but I don’t know what that world is like, or what it was like for those people producing porn and trying to make it feminist.
The second part of the book concerns the feedback cycle between watching porn and producing feminist porn. This section truly embraces intersectionality. They approach the question of feminist porn from the perspectives of race, queer identity, therapy, and more. The essays herein really challenge the reader to consider porn beyond the thin veneer of primarily heterosexual, heavily racist, commodified pornography that we often find at the surface of the industry.
One of my main takeaways of this book is that I really still have so much more to learn about this subject. I feel like I might have felt back when I first started learning about sexism, misogyny, patriarchy, etc. I’m still learning the vocabulary and trying to listen to all the various voices of those directly involved and marginalized by these issues. Most crucially, I’m aware that I need to be careful of generalizing about porn. For example, just before I started reading this book, I was having a conversation with a friend about porn (because, yeah, I have awesome friends who will talk to me about porn). I said, among other things, that it’s unfortunate people often get their sex education from porn these days. In some sense, I still agree with that sentiment—the extremely problematic porn I mentioned above, which is so easily available and prevalent, creates so many problems if internalized as a representation of what sex really is. Yet in making that statement, I simultaneously erased the whole part of the industry devoted to creating actual educational porn.
That’s why the third part of the book is probably my favourite. This section examines the intersections of feminist porn and scholarship. Some of the essays are by academics who write and teach about porn, whether it’s in a women’s studies or gender studies or film studies course. It’s really cool to hear about their experiences creating their syllabi, how they teach, the resistance or buy-in they’ve encountered from students or faculty or the public. As an educator, this all fascinates me. Similarly, as an educator and just someone who believes in good sex ed. in general, I loved reading the essays from Nina Hartley and Tristan Taormino, who explain both their rationales and their methodologies behind creating educational porn. This section also includes a standout essay by Ariane Cruz, who examines her complicated and conflicting feelings as a Black woman studying how porn represents Black women as part of her PhD. She explains the way that this has affected her life, her organization of her personal space at home, and how she relates to herself, to others, to her partner, to pornography.
The final section of this book showcases several feminist porn producers and performers, giving them a platform to explain their personal visions of what feminist porn should comprise. These essays are all fascinating in their own right. I have to admit that by the time I reached them, even though I was already reading this book one essay at a time alongside other books, I was feeling a little psychically fatigued, and I probably didn’t give these as much consideration as they are due.
The United States just passed a law (FOSTA/SESTA) heavily constraining the ways in which sex workers can communicate online. It’s ostensibly to help stop sex-trafficking. Being both Canadian and just very busy and unable to keep on top of every American political crisis, I honestly have not paid much attention to this one—but the sex workers I’ve seen speak about it are not happy, charging the proponents of this law with using it to restrict sex work, to legislate morality—and those are the voices I would listen to. While Canada might not have exactly the same issues, we aren’t necessarily better. Here in Ontario we are about to head into a provincial election, and the Conservative party is chomping at the bit to roll back relatively new curriculum with very progressive and healthy guidelines for teaching sex, sexuality, and gender. In some ways we live in a quite progressive era, yet in others we remain incredibly conservative and judgemental.
Whatever your personal stance on porn and sex work, the fact remains it’s a part of our society. There are people who do it. People who are exploited by it, people who exploit it, people who seek to dismantle and turn it inside out and make it feminist. It is, like any other industry or artistic endeavour or social moment, a complicated and diverse and non-monolithic phenomenon that deserves scrutiny, critique, and careful thought. What kind of society do I want? A feminist one. A sex-positive one. A safe one. And that means engaging with sex work and pornography, discussing it, listening to those involved and trying to steer policy in a way that protects vulnerable people without throwing hard-working people under the bus.
So it kind of seems like The Feminist Porn Book is more necessary today than ever. We need to talk more about sex. We need to stop twisting ourselves into contortions to try to sound both pro-porn or anti-porn depending on who’s listening. That isn’t the point. The point is that we should respect the autonomy and agency of sex workers and take our cues from them when it comes to dismantling and changing the problematic parts of their industry. If I want to talk reform of peer review, I’m going to listen to scientists. As a teacher, I hope my words carry weight when we talk about changing education. So if you are interested in learning more about porn and its intersections with feminism, racism, etc., then this is a great place to start.
But it’s only a start.
This powerful statement, first deployed and used in this essay by Flavia Dzodan, is often on my mind. And I choose to open my review of The Feminist Porn Book with it, because that is how I want to position myself. As a white person, I recognize I have a hell of a lot of privilege in our society. So it is imperative that I remember the importance of intersectionality, and that I work hard not to let my feminist thoughts and statements inadvertently support other systems of oppression.
I choose to open my review of The Feminist Porn Book with this statement, because sex work is a nexus of intersectionality. Sex work requires us to interact with sexism and misogyny, with transphobia and homopobia, with racism and abelism, and with capitalist exploitation. We must engage with all of these issues; we must be intersectional when discussing sex work. So it can’t even be as simple as being “pro” sex work or “anti” sex work or pornography. The issue is far more nuanced than that, and that’s why I picked up this book.
If you want a one-sentence summary: The Feminist Porn Book is a collection of scholarly and personal essays about feminism and porn from people who study, produce, direct, or perform in pornography. Many of the essays are highly academic, both in tone and language and in the sense that they are rigorously cited with endnotes. Many of the essays come from people who have spent most of their adult lives behind of or in front of the camera, directly engaging with pornography and with their own complex feelings about the medium and how it relates with feminist movements. Although certain common themes run throughout some of the essays, and the editors have grouped them largely into four broad topics, each essay is its own revelation given the author’s unique experiences, perspective, and opinions.
This is a diverse book, for the most part. There are cis and trans voices, abled and disabled voices, Black and brown and white voices, straight and queer voices, etc. There are certainly some voices missing from the conversation—in their introduction, the authors admit that this volume focuses on the porn industry of the West: “…for feminist porn to be a global project, more work would need to be done to include non-Western scholars and pornographers in the conversation”. Yet I think it is a good sign of the diversity of this collection that not all of the essays line up behind a single ideology of feminist porn. Or, as the introduction states: “Throughout the book, we explore the multiple definitions of feminist porn, but we refuse to fix its boundaries.” Certainly there are aspects of some essays I didn’t agree with or would critique, others that are oppositional to each other but that I don’t yet have an opinion on, one way or the other. That’s awesome. This is a book that makes you think and question.
The first part of the book provides a bit of history into the emergence of feminist porn. The first essay is an excerpt from Betty Dodson’s memoir. This is one piece that I found both fascinating and occasionally frustrating, for Dodson throws off little nuggets like, “Most men are hardwired to have multiple sex partners…” that set my skeptical-of-evolutionary-psychology-and-gender-essentialism alarm bells ringing. By and large, however, this part of the book is very eye-opening for a younger reader like myself. As someone who came of age online, it’s hard to understand what it would have been like to live in a world that did not have constant, immediate access to porn. I mean, these days it is hard to avoid even with your safe search filter on. I know, in theory, that there existed a time of the porno videotape and the hard copy porno mag, etc.—but I don’t know what that world is like, or what it was like for those people producing porn and trying to make it feminist.
The second part of the book concerns the feedback cycle between watching porn and producing feminist porn. This section truly embraces intersectionality. They approach the question of feminist porn from the perspectives of race, queer identity, therapy, and more. The essays herein really challenge the reader to consider porn beyond the thin veneer of primarily heterosexual, heavily racist, commodified pornography that we often find at the surface of the industry.
One of my main takeaways of this book is that I really still have so much more to learn about this subject. I feel like I might have felt back when I first started learning about sexism, misogyny, patriarchy, etc. I’m still learning the vocabulary and trying to listen to all the various voices of those directly involved and marginalized by these issues. Most crucially, I’m aware that I need to be careful of generalizing about porn. For example, just before I started reading this book, I was having a conversation with a friend about porn (because, yeah, I have awesome friends who will talk to me about porn). I said, among other things, that it’s unfortunate people often get their sex education from porn these days. In some sense, I still agree with that sentiment—the extremely problematic porn I mentioned above, which is so easily available and prevalent, creates so many problems if internalized as a representation of what sex really is. Yet in making that statement, I simultaneously erased the whole part of the industry devoted to creating actual educational porn.
That’s why the third part of the book is probably my favourite. This section examines the intersections of feminist porn and scholarship. Some of the essays are by academics who write and teach about porn, whether it’s in a women’s studies or gender studies or film studies course. It’s really cool to hear about their experiences creating their syllabi, how they teach, the resistance or buy-in they’ve encountered from students or faculty or the public. As an educator, this all fascinates me. Similarly, as an educator and just someone who believes in good sex ed. in general, I loved reading the essays from Nina Hartley and Tristan Taormino, who explain both their rationales and their methodologies behind creating educational porn. This section also includes a standout essay by Ariane Cruz, who examines her complicated and conflicting feelings as a Black woman studying how porn represents Black women as part of her PhD. She explains the way that this has affected her life, her organization of her personal space at home, and how she relates to herself, to others, to her partner, to pornography.
The final section of this book showcases several feminist porn producers and performers, giving them a platform to explain their personal visions of what feminist porn should comprise. These essays are all fascinating in their own right. I have to admit that by the time I reached them, even though I was already reading this book one essay at a time alongside other books, I was feeling a little psychically fatigued, and I probably didn’t give these as much consideration as they are due.
The United States just passed a law (FOSTA/SESTA) heavily constraining the ways in which sex workers can communicate online. It’s ostensibly to help stop sex-trafficking. Being both Canadian and just very busy and unable to keep on top of every American political crisis, I honestly have not paid much attention to this one—but the sex workers I’ve seen speak about it are not happy, charging the proponents of this law with using it to restrict sex work, to legislate morality—and those are the voices I would listen to. While Canada might not have exactly the same issues, we aren’t necessarily better. Here in Ontario we are about to head into a provincial election, and the Conservative party is chomping at the bit to roll back relatively new curriculum with very progressive and healthy guidelines for teaching sex, sexuality, and gender. In some ways we live in a quite progressive era, yet in others we remain incredibly conservative and judgemental.
Whatever your personal stance on porn and sex work, the fact remains it’s a part of our society. There are people who do it. People who are exploited by it, people who exploit it, people who seek to dismantle and turn it inside out and make it feminist. It is, like any other industry or artistic endeavour or social moment, a complicated and diverse and non-monolithic phenomenon that deserves scrutiny, critique, and careful thought. What kind of society do I want? A feminist one. A sex-positive one. A safe one. And that means engaging with sex work and pornography, discussing it, listening to those involved and trying to steer policy in a way that protects vulnerable people without throwing hard-working people under the bus.
So it kind of seems like The Feminist Porn Book is more necessary today than ever. We need to talk more about sex. We need to stop twisting ourselves into contortions to try to sound both pro-porn or anti-porn depending on who’s listening. That isn’t the point. The point is that we should respect the autonomy and agency of sex workers and take our cues from them when it comes to dismantling and changing the problematic parts of their industry. If I want to talk reform of peer review, I’m going to listen to scientists. As a teacher, I hope my words carry weight when we talk about changing education. So if you are interested in learning more about porn and its intersections with feminism, racism, etc., then this is a great place to start.
But it’s only a start.
I originally received an eARC from NetGalley, but for reasons that escape me (probably my own incompetence) I forgot to download it. Out of a desire for completionism, I bought a copy of The Weaver so I could read and review it. Although the basic premise is sound and interesting, Heather Kindt’s writing style didn’t work for me. This attempt at a combination of thriller, romance, and fantasy lacks what I enjoy about those three genres.
Laney is a college student writing a historical novel in her spare time. She is accosted by a man who resembles the antagonist of her novel. Gradually, Laney discovers that she is one of a small number of people—Weavers—whose literary works take on a life of their own. Her characters are coming to life, moving from the world of her novel to this “real” world. The antagonist seeks to control the ending of the story, while the protagonist could potentially protect her. There’s also some love triangle stuff happening, although it gets sidelined.
Kindt’s narration is very much of the tell rather than show variety. That isn’t always a bad thing, but in this case I had trouble connecting with the main characters. The characterization feels flat and often very stock. For example:
Oh, I get it: she’s not like other girls. Cue my eye rolling.
The ratio of dialogue to narration in this book is very low, but the narration lacks the richness that I prefer in books that take such a tactic. There’s a lot of exposition, and it feels very odd from a third-person limited narrator. Maybe if the book were in the first person? Anyway, this stylistic choice made it difficult for me to enjoy The Weaver in general.
The plot has a nice setup, but there isn’t much payoff. Kindt walks us through a gradual building of tension as Laney discovers more about what it means to be a Weaver. However, it takes way too long for Laney to learn about the Weavers. When we do, the actual conflict seems very mundane. As with the narration, there’s just something about Kindt’s choices here, in terms of how to construct scenes and manage conflict/action/suspense, that doesn’t work for me.
In the end, The Weaver leaves me frustrated and wanting more—not in the good way, though. Don’t even get me started on the love triangle!
Firmly “not for me.”
Laney is a college student writing a historical novel in her spare time. She is accosted by a man who resembles the antagonist of her novel. Gradually, Laney discovers that she is one of a small number of people—Weavers—whose literary works take on a life of their own. Her characters are coming to life, moving from the world of her novel to this “real” world. The antagonist seeks to control the ending of the story, while the protagonist could potentially protect her. There’s also some love triangle stuff happening, although it gets sidelined.
Kindt’s narration is very much of the tell rather than show variety. That isn’t always a bad thing, but in this case I had trouble connecting with the main characters. The characterization feels flat and often very stock. For example:
His best friend grew up, nd just looking at her drove him crazy. She was beautiful. Not the high heel, short skirt, plastered on make-up, I’m all that type of beauty he usually dated, and nothing like Jennifer, his current girlfriend. Laney was striking, and she didn’t even know it.
Oh, I get it: she’s not like other girls. Cue my eye rolling.
The ratio of dialogue to narration in this book is very low, but the narration lacks the richness that I prefer in books that take such a tactic. There’s a lot of exposition, and it feels very odd from a third-person limited narrator. Maybe if the book were in the first person? Anyway, this stylistic choice made it difficult for me to enjoy The Weaver in general.
The plot has a nice setup, but there isn’t much payoff. Kindt walks us through a gradual building of tension as Laney discovers more about what it means to be a Weaver. However, it takes way too long for Laney to learn about the Weavers. When we do, the actual conflict seems very mundane. As with the narration, there’s just something about Kindt’s choices here, in terms of how to construct scenes and manage conflict/action/suspense, that doesn’t work for me.
In the end, The Weaver leaves me frustrated and wanting more—not in the good way, though. Don’t even get me started on the love triangle!
Firmly “not for me.”
What's better than a magical mystery? A magical mystery featuring baked goods, you say? Sign me up! Baker Thief is a conventions-busting, inclusive, fun alternate world urban fantasy novel with mysteries and thrills and no small amount of underdogs taking on the corrupt underbelly of corporations.
It is, in short, a good read.
Adèle is a detective recently relocated and transferred to a new unit. Shortly after moving in, a masked, purple-haired thief named Claire breaks into Adèle’s new place, stealing an exocore. These are like magical batteries, and Claire believes there is something wrong with them. Claire is also Claude, the owner of a bakery Adèle has begun to frequent—but, of course, in the requisite dramatic irony, Adèle doesn’t know that. Claire’s genderfluidity isn’t out in public yet. As the mystery of the exocores mounts and more witches go missing, Adèle and Claire begin to develop feelings for each other. But when one is demisexual and the other is aromantic, what exactly do you call that kind of relationship?
Although this book certainly has some dark motifs to it—witches being persecuted and subject to science experiments, violence and murder, etc., there is a mirthfulness to Claudie Arsenault’s writing that is so enjoyably evident here. Baker Thief features little touches to the narration that let you immerse yourself in this world and its characters, whether it’s Claude discussing how relaxing he finds baking bread or Adèle feeling bolstered by her new captain’s sardonic responses to twists of fate. From chapter titles in French to wordplay and sarcastic remarks, there’s enough levity and humour here to keep the book feeling light despite the serious, high stakes of the plot. That’s not an easy tight rope to walk!
Elements of the mystery are going to be familiar to regular fantasy readers. Arsenault reaches deep into some rich fantasy tropes when it comes to the interactions between magic users and the environment. Nevertheless, she deploys these tropes with creativity and accuracy such that they land in fresh and interesting ways. She also understands pacing and scene/sequel construction, so even though I wasn’t always surprised by the turn of events, my brain was kept quite satisfied. Like a freshly-baked croissant, the plot makes your mouth water because of this familiarity rather than in spite of it.
My main critique of the book, and its plot, would be the handling of the climax and falling action. Don’t get me wrong: Arsenault sets up quite a confrontation between the bad guys and our ragtag band of intrepid heroes. Nevertheless, there is a smoothness to it that doesn’t pay off the way I’d like. I hope that, in future books, as the series develops and we learn more about the exocores and the persecution of witches, Adèle and Claire are faced with some more difficult choices in their quest to right these wrongs.
Baker Thief also strives to be inclusive and diversely representative in a very positive way. As an aromantic/asexual and trans person, it’s nice to see a society depicted where characters like me exist and our queerness is not persecuted. There is persecution and injustice in this society, but it’s directed at witches. Even the bad guys don’t misgender people in this world. Yes, Claire is still reluctant to reveal her “secret identity” to the world—but that’s wrapped up in the complications of her nightly activities. Moreover, I think Arsenault has it right that a world with less persecution of LGBTQ+ people doesn’t mean everyone is going to be 100% out right away. Questioning is still often a very personal and private thing!
There’s also fat rep, and some disability rep (both mental health and at least one character with a prosthetic limb).
All in all, I loved the world of Baker Thief. I loved that I could almost smell the food, and that the “romance” between the two protagonists was not, in fact, a romance. Let’s have more of that, shall we?
It is, in short, a good read.
Adèle is a detective recently relocated and transferred to a new unit. Shortly after moving in, a masked, purple-haired thief named Claire breaks into Adèle’s new place, stealing an exocore. These are like magical batteries, and Claire believes there is something wrong with them. Claire is also Claude, the owner of a bakery Adèle has begun to frequent—but, of course, in the requisite dramatic irony, Adèle doesn’t know that. Claire’s genderfluidity isn’t out in public yet. As the mystery of the exocores mounts and more witches go missing, Adèle and Claire begin to develop feelings for each other. But when one is demisexual and the other is aromantic, what exactly do you call that kind of relationship?
Although this book certainly has some dark motifs to it—witches being persecuted and subject to science experiments, violence and murder, etc., there is a mirthfulness to Claudie Arsenault’s writing that is so enjoyably evident here. Baker Thief features little touches to the narration that let you immerse yourself in this world and its characters, whether it’s Claude discussing how relaxing he finds baking bread or Adèle feeling bolstered by her new captain’s sardonic responses to twists of fate. From chapter titles in French to wordplay and sarcastic remarks, there’s enough levity and humour here to keep the book feeling light despite the serious, high stakes of the plot. That’s not an easy tight rope to walk!
Elements of the mystery are going to be familiar to regular fantasy readers. Arsenault reaches deep into some rich fantasy tropes when it comes to the interactions between magic users and the environment. Nevertheless, she deploys these tropes with creativity and accuracy such that they land in fresh and interesting ways. She also understands pacing and scene/sequel construction, so even though I wasn’t always surprised by the turn of events, my brain was kept quite satisfied. Like a freshly-baked croissant, the plot makes your mouth water because of this familiarity rather than in spite of it.
My main critique of the book, and its plot, would be the handling of the climax and falling action. Don’t get me wrong: Arsenault sets up quite a confrontation between the bad guys and our ragtag band of intrepid heroes. Nevertheless, there is a smoothness to it that doesn’t pay off the way I’d like. I hope that, in future books, as the series develops and we learn more about the exocores and the persecution of witches, Adèle and Claire are faced with some more difficult choices in their quest to right these wrongs.
Baker Thief also strives to be inclusive and diversely representative in a very positive way. As an aromantic/asexual and trans person, it’s nice to see a society depicted where characters like me exist and our queerness is not persecuted. There is persecution and injustice in this society, but it’s directed at witches. Even the bad guys don’t misgender people in this world. Yes, Claire is still reluctant to reveal her “secret identity” to the world—but that’s wrapped up in the complications of her nightly activities. Moreover, I think Arsenault has it right that a world with less persecution of LGBTQ+ people doesn’t mean everyone is going to be 100% out right away. Questioning is still often a very personal and private thing!
There’s also fat rep, and some disability rep (both mental health and at least one character with a prosthetic limb).
All in all, I loved the world of Baker Thief. I loved that I could almost smell the food, and that the “romance” between the two protagonists was not, in fact, a romance. Let’s have more of that, shall we?
Is truth beauty and beauty, truth? It can be hard to tell.
In Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, Sabine Hossenfelder argues that these two concepts are not equivalent. As the subtitle implies, Hossenfelder feels that theoretical physicists are too obsessed with creating “beautiful” theories, in the sense that the mathematics that underpins the theories (because these days, theories are basically math, even though, as Hossenfelder stresses, physics isn’t math) must be beautiful and use “natural” numbers (by which she means numbers close to 1). Theories that don’t conform to these criteria tend to be unpopular, to receive less funding for experiments and less attention in papers. This, Hossenfelder contends, is a mistake. She fears it reinforces an orthodoxy that threatens theoretical physics with stagnation and, worse, undermines the scientific method. In her view, since theoretical physics is often regarded as the “hardest” of hard sciences, if faith in the foundations of physics goes, so too goes trust in science—right when we need it more than ever.
I guess this book kind of hits the sweet spot for me, because I’m big into the intersections of philosophy and mathematics and science. Thanks to NetGalley and Basic Books for the free eARC!
I love thinking about the limits not just of what we know but also what is knowable. This, to me, is why theoretical physics fascinates me—not just because it explains the foundations of our physical existence, but because it knocks up against literally the limits of our ability to measure and quantify. Each time we want to go looking for heavier and heavier particles, for example, we need bigger and bigger particle accelerators. That’s why we built the LHC, which—in Hossenfelder’s opinion—has been a bit of a bust in terms of new physics. But we’re running up against the limits of what we can do on Earth, or even in orbit … what’s next? Particle accelerators the size of our solar system? I get chills.
Lost in Math is not really about physics in the popular science sense. This is more accurately a philosophy book. Hossenfelder discusses a lot of physics concepts (most of which, to be honest, go way over my head), but ultimately she is more interested in looking at why her colleagues in theoretical physics chase the theories that they do. Unlike some of them, she confesses that she doesn’t seem to have a nose for beauty, that she doesn’t recognize a beautiful theory when she sees it—and she is uneasy about this reliance on ideas of beauty.
So while the book follows the fairly standard approach in popular science texts of doing a brief overview of the history of physics, Hossenfelder is looking at the philosophies that were at work rather than the merits of the actual theories. As familiar names—Bohr and Einstein and Schrodinger and Heisenberg and Dirac et al—move across the page, we learn more about their thinking—insofar as we can know it—than their specific contributions. Hossenfelder isn’t looking to teach physics here. She’s asking us to think critically about why we have the physics we do.
I think this is a really interesting and important point. To laypeople, like myself, it might seem inevitable that we’ve ended up here. After all, there is only one true science, right? We might have made a bunch of false starts, but along the way, as we uncover more and more “facts” and tinker with our theories and run better experiments, we’re narrowing it down and getting closer to “the truth”, right?
Well … it’s complicated. As Hossenfelder explains, it isn’t so much that the physics we have now is The One True Physics as it is Something That Mostly Works. And in the case of quantum physics, there are actually a whole bunch of competing interpretations that explain the same phenomena, just differently, and at the moment they all tend to be valid because no one has figured out a way to test between them. So as much as both philosophers and physicists would like the other camp to stay out of their business, when you get right down to it, the two are entwined at the moment.
Hossenfelder tours the landscape of theoretical physics, interviewing researchers in different fields to help her understand the obsession with naturalness and beauty. Along the way, you will pick up on her clear sense of exasperation with what’s happening in her profession. It isn’t just the naturalness argument: it’s the whole system, the fighting over short-term grants and positions, the tendency to reward people who publish more often, on more accepted topics, over people who spend their time tinkering with more heterodox approaches. And maybe how surprised I am by Hossenfelder’s tone and voice, or even the fact that this book got written, further supports this idea, since we are so used to “gee whiz” pop physics books that emphasize the beauty of the universe and of the theories that explain it. Physicists who write books for popular consumption are generally trying to build a following, and I get the impression Hossenfelder really doesn’t care about that. While I find Hossenfelder’s writing, in general, to be mediocre, her forthright and honest tone is refreshing and interesting.
There’s a fair bit of mathematical concepts in this book too. That probably shouldn’t be surprising, given its title. There aren’t actual equations, but Hossenfelder throws around terms like “groups” fairly generously without really going into what they are (and maybe that’s for the best). As with the physics shop talk, if you don’t have much of a grounding in abstract algebra, you’re going to feel a little out of the loop. This is not a light read. It is, however, enjoyable in the sense that it tickles the part of your brain that really wants to think hard about things.
Lost in Math succeeds, largely, in what it sets out to do. It demonstrates that certain elements of how theoretical physicists theorize right now aren’t the most conducive or productive. It pulls back the curtain for a wider audience, exposing us to some of the philosophical debates and issues that have long been happening within the physics community, which laypeople might wrongly perceive as monolithic in approach, if not in interpretations. Hossenfelder’s writing is a little dry, and the book is full of challenging concepts … but I think it’s worth a try if you want some philosophy in with your science.
In Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, Sabine Hossenfelder argues that these two concepts are not equivalent. As the subtitle implies, Hossenfelder feels that theoretical physicists are too obsessed with creating “beautiful” theories, in the sense that the mathematics that underpins the theories (because these days, theories are basically math, even though, as Hossenfelder stresses, physics isn’t math) must be beautiful and use “natural” numbers (by which she means numbers close to 1). Theories that don’t conform to these criteria tend to be unpopular, to receive less funding for experiments and less attention in papers. This, Hossenfelder contends, is a mistake. She fears it reinforces an orthodoxy that threatens theoretical physics with stagnation and, worse, undermines the scientific method. In her view, since theoretical physics is often regarded as the “hardest” of hard sciences, if faith in the foundations of physics goes, so too goes trust in science—right when we need it more than ever.
I guess this book kind of hits the sweet spot for me, because I’m big into the intersections of philosophy and mathematics and science. Thanks to NetGalley and Basic Books for the free eARC!
I love thinking about the limits not just of what we know but also what is knowable. This, to me, is why theoretical physics fascinates me—not just because it explains the foundations of our physical existence, but because it knocks up against literally the limits of our ability to measure and quantify. Each time we want to go looking for heavier and heavier particles, for example, we need bigger and bigger particle accelerators. That’s why we built the LHC, which—in Hossenfelder’s opinion—has been a bit of a bust in terms of new physics. But we’re running up against the limits of what we can do on Earth, or even in orbit … what’s next? Particle accelerators the size of our solar system? I get chills.
Lost in Math is not really about physics in the popular science sense. This is more accurately a philosophy book. Hossenfelder discusses a lot of physics concepts (most of which, to be honest, go way over my head), but ultimately she is more interested in looking at why her colleagues in theoretical physics chase the theories that they do. Unlike some of them, she confesses that she doesn’t seem to have a nose for beauty, that she doesn’t recognize a beautiful theory when she sees it—and she is uneasy about this reliance on ideas of beauty.
So while the book follows the fairly standard approach in popular science texts of doing a brief overview of the history of physics, Hossenfelder is looking at the philosophies that were at work rather than the merits of the actual theories. As familiar names—Bohr and Einstein and Schrodinger and Heisenberg and Dirac et al—move across the page, we learn more about their thinking—insofar as we can know it—than their specific contributions. Hossenfelder isn’t looking to teach physics here. She’s asking us to think critically about why we have the physics we do.
I think this is a really interesting and important point. To laypeople, like myself, it might seem inevitable that we’ve ended up here. After all, there is only one true science, right? We might have made a bunch of false starts, but along the way, as we uncover more and more “facts” and tinker with our theories and run better experiments, we’re narrowing it down and getting closer to “the truth”, right?
Well … it’s complicated. As Hossenfelder explains, it isn’t so much that the physics we have now is The One True Physics as it is Something That Mostly Works. And in the case of quantum physics, there are actually a whole bunch of competing interpretations that explain the same phenomena, just differently, and at the moment they all tend to be valid because no one has figured out a way to test between them. So as much as both philosophers and physicists would like the other camp to stay out of their business, when you get right down to it, the two are entwined at the moment.
Hossenfelder tours the landscape of theoretical physics, interviewing researchers in different fields to help her understand the obsession with naturalness and beauty. Along the way, you will pick up on her clear sense of exasperation with what’s happening in her profession. It isn’t just the naturalness argument: it’s the whole system, the fighting over short-term grants and positions, the tendency to reward people who publish more often, on more accepted topics, over people who spend their time tinkering with more heterodox approaches. And maybe how surprised I am by Hossenfelder’s tone and voice, or even the fact that this book got written, further supports this idea, since we are so used to “gee whiz” pop physics books that emphasize the beauty of the universe and of the theories that explain it. Physicists who write books for popular consumption are generally trying to build a following, and I get the impression Hossenfelder really doesn’t care about that. While I find Hossenfelder’s writing, in general, to be mediocre, her forthright and honest tone is refreshing and interesting.
There’s a fair bit of mathematical concepts in this book too. That probably shouldn’t be surprising, given its title. There aren’t actual equations, but Hossenfelder throws around terms like “groups” fairly generously without really going into what they are (and maybe that’s for the best). As with the physics shop talk, if you don’t have much of a grounding in abstract algebra, you’re going to feel a little out of the loop. This is not a light read. It is, however, enjoyable in the sense that it tickles the part of your brain that really wants to think hard about things.
Lost in Math succeeds, largely, in what it sets out to do. It demonstrates that certain elements of how theoretical physicists theorize right now aren’t the most conducive or productive. It pulls back the curtain for a wider audience, exposing us to some of the philosophical debates and issues that have long been happening within the physics community, which laypeople might wrongly perceive as monolithic in approach, if not in interpretations. Hossenfelder’s writing is a little dry, and the book is full of challenging concepts … but I think it’s worth a try if you want some philosophy in with your science.