Caridad/Carrie, a Cuban-American mother and her two teenage children, Joaquin and Elena, live on an island off Texas (did you know that was a thing--it is!). The first half of the novel is narrated by 16-year-old Elena and the second by recent high school grad Joaquin with a few Caridad chapters interspersed.

The liars reveal takes a while, and when it does, it's a bummer for the women of the family. I need to take a little time with this because I'm a Jennifer Mathieu fan, but this book rubs me the wrong way. I'd love to hear what others think.

Thanks, NetGalley for the ARC. I didn't finish The Secret TO Superhuman Strength. It was cerebral like Are You My Mother, rather than intimate like Fun Home. There were moments in the first 50 pages, like young Alison's relationship with her masculinity, despite having little interest in team sports.

Of course the art is worth looking at, but it was mostly emotionally distant.

Josie is a high school student journalist, who has already begun her career, writing for Essence. Then she wins a contest with a mainstream magazine and gets to cover a film premier and write a cover profile of the film's young star, Marius, who is one of two Black members of the cast. Marius, like Josie, is queer, as is his character, a boy who endures conversion therapy. The film's director and headliners are straight white guys, and right away Josie, along with some other Black critics have questions the press junket organizers didn't expect.

It turns out there's a bigger story, though, an abusive director of another film who has assaulted or otherwise harassed an untold number of actors and film staff. Reporting on the abuse is scary for Josie, who herself has survived assault, not that she recognized it as assault at the time. Josie is on the tour with her older sister, Alice, who Josie doesn't get along with as well as her oldest sister, but the experience brings them closer.

Each chapter is headed by a sharp, funny, or vulnerable tweet. There's also a love story and Josie working through feelings of anxiety and concerns about her size. She's fat, unlike her sisters and all the movie stars she finds herself among.

I really loved this book and hated for it to end.

Bug is having a rough summer. Her beloved uncle just died, her mom is in trouble financially, she's starting middle school in the fall, and her house is haunted. Middle school is the worst for kids who are different, but perhaps buoyed by Uncle Roderick, Bug seems to have a good sense of self and clarity about who she is and how she wants to be. She's not into the girly stuff her best friend Moira likes. As it turns out, neither is the ghost, or poltergeist, or...Uncle Roderick?

Regardless, when

Spoiler

Bug finally figures out what the haunting is all about and understands that he's a boy, it's less scary than he expected. Moira is chill about it

She rolls her eyes. "I mean, it's not really something I get to be 'okay with' right? It's just, like, who you are."

I love this relatable revelation from Bug, once he's onto himself.

And all of a sudden I understand why people like shopping. I mean, don't love it. I'd still rather read, or ride my bike. But now that Moira is helping me pick from the boys' section instead of the girls', it's actually fun.

Too Bright to See is cool because it's an issue novel hidden inside a mystery. It also has takes that feel entirely appropriate to a kid who likes to read and has a rich inner life. Bug dissociates, narrating life in the third person, until the reveal toward the end. It's a gentle story, despite being about a big topic, or at least a topic that seems big to people born in the 20th century. I hope most Zoomers are as cool as Bug's cohort.

Disclosure: I am friendquaintances with the author, who I like and admire perhaps to excess.

Thanks: Edelweiss for the ARC

When I read a big book, I'm often skeptical and probably overly critical and usually disappointed. DT is all it's touted to be and a little more. Seriously, it has my vote for the Great American Novel, at least in the white author category.

I don't think it's a spoiler to say that the primary protags, Reese and Ames, are ex-girlfriends and Ames is presenting as guy now. In addition to its Greatness, DT is a love story about friendship and romance, that I won't say transcend gender because they're better for the nuanced gendered relationships. As in all the best writing, through specificity, that nuance is accessible regardless of what your first or secondhand knowledge is of trans and queer communities. Peters probably explains more than she would like to, but doesn't present the story as a trans 101 (at least to my cisgender eye).

I observe the same thing about the language. The Ivy League and Iowa Writers Workshop alum is fluent in academese, poetric description, and political analysis, as evidenced by this characterization of Ames's workplace,

The speculation took on a tone both of lurid and compulsory--to have a boss is so commonplace that one rarely remarks on its strangeness, yet its structure compels a cult of personality around even the most quotidian of managers. As an underling, one needs to furnish an epistemology of how it came to pass that she has sway over one's precious autonomy. Basic comprehension of capitalism's arbitrary mechanics doesn't satisfy--the heart demands a human explanation. Or at least that's what Ames said to justify his initial crush.

but it feels within reach even for someone with a mediocre education like mine.

I'm often frustrated by love interests in novels seeming overly perfect, but every one of the three in the triangle of central characters is complex and flawed, from Reese's attraction to asshole men, Ames's self-centeredness, and the one who joins later in the book, Katrina, who both gets and deeply doesn't get the othered experience Ames had and Reese is still having as a trans woman in a violently hostile society. Ames and Reese are white, and mixed race Chinese Katrina appears white to many in New York. Peters addresses her characters' racial identities and the differences in white trans women's lives as opposed to those of BIPOC trans women in a way that feels (to me, white cis woman) like an acknowledgment rooted in community and not a token gesture. Peters covers a lot of ground in DT, but one novel cannot everything to all people.

"Yeah, I have the bad habit of saying trans women when I mean white trans women, which is how you can tell I was a white trans woman; it's endemic among white trans women.

I highlighted another ten passages, but I'll leave them for you to discover or not on your own if there's anyone left in my communities who hasn't read Detransition Baby yet. I'm looking forward to reading it again in a year or two.

One Last Stop is a journey (pun) that starts and ends in my neighborhood. That was a fun surprise! I requested this book from NetGalley because I loved Red, White, and Royal Blue to excess. Instead of a queer British prince and an American president's son, the lovers in OLS are drifter girls who meet on the Q train at the Parkside stop in Flatbush, Brooklyn, August and Jane.

After attending a number of colleges with a number of majors, New Orleans native August has relocated to Brooklyn to matriculate at Brooklyn College with a sociology major. She moves into a 6th floor walkup to live with what almost immediately becomes her queer family. Roommates Niko, Myla, and Wes are lovable weirdos, as are the rest of the characters in August's Brooklyn world. I'm realizing as I write this that I found a lot to love in OLS. It just wasn't as race-to-the-end as RW&RB.

Jane is a mystery girl and a case to be solved, and her story is truly surprising. Wacky adventures, love, and hot sex about. Enjoy!

I reread this book because I wondered if it was a fluke that I loved it so much the first time I read it. I did. The one thing I might add for this time around is that the love story is buoyed by the queer love triumph. I love a story that includes a social or political underdog, e.g., a union or a person of color achieving over adversity, repression, or nastiness.

This is everything I've been waiting for in a perimenopause book. The key element is the "I" voice. The author is an expert in their own experience who has also done their research in what the menopausal transition might be like for others. They are also honest about what a reader may expect. They touch on what perimenopause might be like for people experiencing medical menopause, e.g., cancer survivors, as well as people assigned male or female at birth but have transitioned to another gender via hormones or surgery. However, they alert the reader that they won't feel as seen in What Fresh Hell Is This as they may in book written specifically for their own population. And yet they attempt to touch on the issues and experiences of people going through a different kind of menopause. They are clear, too, that everyone's menopause is different.

Corinna is a GenXer who writes with a gentle authority--again, using a first person narrative or by interviewing people holding other facial, ethnic, and gender identities from theirs, as well as people with disabilities of which Corinna is one. Their expertise doesn't have the ring of "I Am The Expert" that other medical and medical adjacent books I've read do.

I've also read more casual books, comics, and zines that deal with perimenopause. While they can be a lot of fun, none of them has provided the symptom by symptom rundown that Corinna does. It is reassuring, or maybe preassuring for people earlier in the meno that periods are likely to get closer together before they get farther apart. You might have flooding periods. They're normally--but here's how to recognize when they're not. I wish I'd had WFHIT five years ago. I also wish partners and family members and anyone who lives with people going through The Change would read the book. My cohabitant is going to!

People who fetishize books annoy me. Will share more later.

Protagonist Eva Traube Abrams is an elderly librarian and a Parisian 23-year-old of Polish descent when we meet her in flashback. She lives with her immigrant parents under the Nazi occupation. One night, while Eva and her mother are watching a bigoted neighbors kids her father is taken. Eva and her mother were on the list, too, so Eva shrewdly plans and executes their escape over her mother's objections.

There's nothing terrible about this book. It's just a little simple to me. The easy talent for forgery, the brief love triangle and love story, the reunions...they're all kind of annoying.

However, I do appreciate the premise of the title object. Children's given names are embedded in the book by Eva, who is sensitive to the fact that although the young Jewish refugees' lives are being saved by the French Resistance, their identities will be lost. I admire her ingratitude for the saving that isn't saving and her finding an encrypted method for keeping track of them.

I predict this book will make an excellent feel-good movie starring a largely non-Jewish cast.

Gunnie means gunslinger/mercenary, and Lizbeth Rose is a good one, despite being only 19. Her stepfather taught her to shoot, and she used her training to kill her father, whose family are affiliated with the Holy Russian Empire, land known in our timeline as California and Oregon.

FDR was the last president and an influenza reconfigured the former United States. (This book was published in 2019, if you're wondering, based on the flu backstory) Lizbeth lives in Texoma and is half-Mexican as well as half-Russian.

There's decent world-building and a lot of killing. Even people who are thought dead sometimes need killing again, so if you don't love gratuitous murder, An Easy Death may not be your jam. It's not like I'm a big murder fan--I'm sensitive!--but I was still engaged and non-judgmental throughout. You have to admire Lizbeth's grit.

The one element of the novel I really didn't like was the love story, even if it's consummation was prefaced in a funny way.

He had a few rubbers, which just proved that men were natural optimists when it came to opportunity.

Hey, I'm going down to into Mexico with my big-sister grigori, and we're traveling through hick towns on a desperate secret mission. I may get killed. But who knows? I might also have a chance to have sex.