Hazel Jane Plante

All the characters in Any Other City felt like real, messy people. The exploration of this segment of punk trans femme queer culture was great - gritty, soft, and funny in balanced portions. The first section, in which the main character has not yet figured out that she’s trans, but is both beginning to have a gender crisis and getting her first connections to a trans community, was the most compelling to me. The way Tracy’s insecurity and denial of her own identity made her made her think and do some pretty unpleasant things to the other trans women in her life and the way they still recognized her before she knew herself were painfully real experiences to read about. The second section started to lose me for a while, but it came back to being touching and raw by the end.

I will warn this book is full of graphic and frequent sex scenes. I can appreciate the desire to portray sexuality openly and unflinchingly, whether it is beautiful or gross, damaging, freeing or just fun. However, the detailed descriptions did become a bit much to listen to for me at some point in the second half. Listening to it as an audiobook may have contributed to that.… (plus d'informations)

2019. A lovesong to a dead friend. The narrator, a trans woman realizes belatedly that she was in love with her friend who died, Vivian. Interesting juxtaposition of a lesbian trans woman and a straight trans woman. This book is a bit bizarre as it spends a lot of time describing a very weird, fictional tv show called Little Blue. I thought there would be a point to it somewhere, but it was just a jumping off point to talk about Vivian a lot. I wished more had happened with the show. But a strong effort, well written and poignant.… (plus d'informations)

this is maybe not the first book ive given 5 stars but it's the first that's made me cry a lot in a while. and I usually DONT cry about books, last time a book made me cry was the Amber Spyglass.

I liked that the book was really accessible, I don't like overly complicated things like Pale Fire which may be superficially similar to this one in that both are exercises in verisimilitude (even moreso in this case cuz some of the pop culture references are real but a lot, like the namesake Little Blue, aren't), but the style didn't get in the way of the narrative IMO. And that left me wondering how much of this was real because the emotions seemed very real...

Maybe my favorite part is that the author didn't say how Viv died, and the 'spoiler' at the end is that she isn't going to say why. I honestly didn't want to know, because I'm sick of books about my existence being inherently tragic, but I could imagine cis ppl reading this anticipating some sort of reveal and then getting frustrated LOL
… (plus d'informations)