Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

by Andrea Lawlor

This book is shockingly good, and also not for the faint of heart. It’s sex, drugs, queerness, rough trade, postpunk, university town politics, womyn’s festivals, and magical realism, all mashed together and set in 1993. How could I resist? It’s like they wrote it just for me.

Paul is an artsy, opinionated, and super-louche queer boy. He tends bar at the only gay bar in a college town and lives perpetually on the bleeding edge of poverty and the AIDS epidemic. He trades on his good looks and alluring hauteur for sex, coffee, and whatever else he can get his greedy little hands on. He’s Desire personified, and he’s got a secret: he can change sex at will.

Literally: we’re not only talking gender here, we’re talking everything. His face, skin, build, primary and secondary sexual characteristics, everything. Think of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. (Yes, I’m using “he/him” pronouns; that’s what Paul uses throughout the book, even when he’s Polly.) In his resting state, he defaults to male. But whenever he feels like it (and whenever it feels safe) he can physically transform as much or as little as he likes, from vaguely femme right up through being a fully-fleshed-out female.

It takes some effort to stay that way, but it’s worth it. His constant, restless appetite—for food, drugs, sex, experiences of all kinds—takes him everywhere, and his ability to shapeshift means “everywhere” can include women’s spaces and straight boys’ beds. And lesbians’ beds, too: and then he falls in love with one, which means suddenly he needs to maintain his female form all the time. Except he can’t.

Hijinks ensue, taking him across the country and finally landing him in San Francisco. Along the way he goes through just about every sort of struggle and every height of pleasure available to a beautiful, impossible-to-categorize young queer in the 1990s. The writing is gorgeous, Paul is irresistible, and you’ll develop your next playlist as you read. Read this book.

Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe

Gender Queer is a graphic memoir about coming of age as genderqueer and asexual. If you don’t know what any of this means, great! When you’re done reading this book, you will. But we can start here:

A graphic memoir is a memoir that looks like a novel-length comic book—it’s written and illustrated in panels, with word bubbles and so on. But it’s not a made-up story, and there are no superheroes or anthropomorphic animals. It’s somebody’s life story; specifically, the story of Maia Kobabe’s growing-up years.

The author identifies as genderqueer. That’s a pretty general label for people who don’t identify as either male or female—deep inside, they don’t feel like either, or maybe they feel like a little of both, or maybe which gender they feel like changes from day to day, or maybe the whole idea of gender, as either a binary or a spectrum, feels alien and wrong to their experience of the world and themselves--so the labels “male” and “female” both feel deeply wrong to them.

The author is also asexual, which is a sexual orientation (like straight, or gay, or bisexual, or any other label that identifies who you’re sexually attracted to). Asexuals (sometimes called aces for short) have no sexual desire for anybody, though some aces do enjoy romantic relationships.

So, those are the basics, extremely simplified. What this book does, skillfully, is help you *understand* all that, by showing it to you through the lens of one person’s experience.

You won’t just get exposed to the terminology (though that’s not a small part of this book); you’ll get a sense of what it feels like to grow up as a singularly-shaped peg that everyone insists should fit into either a round or a square hole. The author’s skill with words and pictures makes what could be a dry primer on gender into a story you will probably find yourself relating to—If you’ve ever been a teenager who feels at all different from their parents and/or peers, that is.

Definitely worth a read.

The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov

read by Paul Boehmer

So humanity has found a way to time travel, and to edit history (and therefore the future) for the good of humanity. But it’s run by a cadre of chest-thumping nerd boys who live together with next to no female companionship (and no female colleagues at all) outside of time, in a no-place called Eternity. 

Eternity is meant to be a safe bubble of idealism and intellectual stimulation, free from distractions and the sorts of personal prejudices that would lead to bad decisions… but which, in reality, is a seething cauldron of bitter competition, thwarted desire, unexamined privilege, and unchecked neurosis. 

Basically, if you put a bunch of Silicon Valley bros in charge of all of time, it would look something like this.

I spent a lot of time gnashing my teeth at the obvious error of putting a bunch of putatively meritocratous hormone-soaked monks in charge of humanity’s destiny, and trying to tell myself that Asimov grew up when and where he grew up and so had some serious but understandable blind spots when writing this. And then, when the main character (duh) becomes willing to mess up all of history and therefore the entire future of everyone purely because he wants to get laid, I gnashed my teeth even harder.

But I kept reading… because it was a classic that I’d never gotten around to, and it’s not that long, and I figured what the heck.

And then it turns out that Asimov was taking all of this into account… but if I tell you how, I’ll spoil the book for you.

Verdict: read it. But only if you can stand to grit your teeth for the first 90% of the book. In my opinion, it was worth it.

The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton

read by Davina Porter

It’s 1686. Nella has traveled from her home in the countryside to Amsterdam to join her new husband’s household. But when she arrives, being the wife of a wealthy merchant isn’t at all what she imagined. Somehow Nella has to learn how to be a proper wife and citizen, but she has no idea how and nobody to help her.

She rarely sees her husband, who seems kind enough in his way but takes almost no interest in her; his proud, cold sister is the one who is really in charge of the household; and one of the servants is an insolent keyhole-listener and the other is a foreigner. Nella is lonely, bored, and cooped up in the imposing house almost every day, with no company but her little bird, Peebo. Her few interactions with the burghers who should be her peers leave her perplexed at best.

Then one day her husband brings her a wedding gift: a model of their house the size of a cabinet. Nella commissions a miniaturist to create tiny residents and furniture for the house—but soon finds that the miniaturist seems to know a lot more about the goings-on in her household than she herself does. In fact, everyone she meets seems to know more about her household than she does. All these secrets lead inevitably to disaster, and then Nella really needs to find sources of strength.

This is a gorgeously claustrophobic, twisty-turny book—Diana Gabaldon meets Margaret Atwood. Highly recommend, especially if you like a beautifully-researched period piece that doesn’t succumb to stereotypes. And speaking of Diana Gabaldon, the narrator of the audiobook version is Davina Porter, who also narrated all the Outlander books, and she is nothing short of amazing.

How to Be Famous by Caitlin Moran

read by Louise Brealey

Such a good book. I couldn’t get over how good this book was the whole time I was reading it—and that was after thoroughly enjoying How to Build a Girl. I laughed out loud so many times, I had to think twice about reading it in public. There was one, comparing a man’s parts to a turnstile, that was so good that I had to call my partner and repeat it to him and laugh all over again.

First off: no, you don’t have to have read How to Build a Girl to enjoy this book… but it would probably help. If you haven’t already, I recommend it. It’s a terrific book in itself and I’ve already reviewed it on this blog.

Second: if swearing, casual drug use, excessive drinking, and frank discussions of sex that don’t mince words aren’t your bag, this is not the book for you.

Now that’s out of the way, let me tell you a bit more about this fabulous book. It’s about Johanna Morrigan (AKA Dolly Wilde) again, but now it’s 1994. She’s 19, living in London, and a successful writer. She’s still desperately in love with John Kite, and he still doesn’t return her affections, but never mind: she has a plan. She’s going to write him into being in love with her.

Along the way, she’ll have to somehow get her marijuana-addled dad to move out of her flat, teach John to value his teen girl fans, and—and this is the whopper—decide what to do about being very publicly slut-shamed by the entire London music scene after a disastrous encounter with a Famous.

This is How to Build a Girl for the #metoo era. Tremendous fun. Read it!

World Without End by Ken Follett

read by John Lee

It’s two centuries after the building of Kingsbridge Cathedral, and while many things have stayed the same—for example, the balance of power between the hidebound clergy and the rapacious nobility is constantly being pushed at by both sides, pretty much always to the detriment of everyone else—change is on the way. The Hundred Years’ War has begun, and the Black Death is on the horizon. This won’t just mean the death of 60% of the population, but also the beginning of the end of the feudal system. New ideas about medicine and architecture are beginning to develop, among other things, and they’ll change the world, too.

In World Without End we see all of this through the eyes of four main characters: Caris, the daughter of a wool merchant; Merthin and Ralph, two very different sons of an impoverished knight; and Gwenda, the daughter of a ne’er-do-well landless laborer. As the book begins, they’re all children. Gwenda is being made to steal a nobleman’s purse at a crowded church service—which immediately leads to a plot twist I don’t want to spoil. In fact the entire book is essentially a big ball of easily-spoiled twisty-turny plotty-wotty stuff. In fact the plot thickens at such a pace that it’s as dense as a neutron star long before you get to the middle of the book's thousand or so pages (a.k.a. 45+  hours of audiobook).

Don’t let the size of the thing put you off, though. I’m long past the age when I was a size queen about books (ah, to be young and have time for a book-a-day habit—during the summer, at least), but I was engaged all the way through. Yes, Follett is putting characters with relatively modern mind-sets into a historical setting—but only relatively modern, and there’s a reason for it. He’s writing about a time when the world was changing pretty rapidly, after all. And he also includes plenty of characters with thoroughly contemporary points of view, including two of the four POV characters, only one of whom is a villain.

By having his main characters start off as children who don’t understand everything, Follett eases the reader into a world that isn’t fully understood. And throughout the book he explains all sorts of things we may not be familiar with, without ever making the reader feel talked down to; it just seems very natural that a given character wouldn’t understand a given situation or a technology fully, and you learn about it along with them. There are several times when some characters seem painfully and even unrealistically naive, but that's my only quibble with a really grand work of historical fiction.

For fans of the first book in this trilogy, Pillars of the Earth, this is a must-read. But you needn't have read the first book to enjoy this one thoroughly; it's written to stand alone. Strongly recommend.

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

Read by Cherise Boothe

Those of us who love science fiction are probably well acquainted with the idea of the generation ship story. Starting with Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky and Herbert’s Destination: Void, and on through the years (well, many of us started with those; technically the genre began with Don Wilcox's short story, “The Voyage that Lasted 600 Years,” published in Amazing in October 1940), and on through the Pixar movie, Wall-E, it’s become a well-established trope. For good reasons, which I will go into shortly.

But first, for anybody not familiar with the concept of the generation ship, here’s the general idea:

Traveling from our solar system to another star, at any currently likely level of technology, will take many, many years. Our nearest neighbor is Proxima Centauri, at 4.243 light years away—which means it takes light, the fastest thing in the universe, 4.243 years to get from here to there. Since we aren’t yet (and aren’t likely to be anytime soon) capable of traveling anywhere near the speed of light, getting there would take a very long time. In fact, at our current capability, it would take over 81,000 years (yes, that’s the right number of zeroes) to get there—and most stars are much further.

Even if we manage to improve our technology quite a bit, it’s likely that it will take centuries, at least, to travel to the nearest star system with potentially-habitable planets in it. But the human lifespan is only several decades, or a bit over a single century at best. So how to solve the problem of visiting or even colonizing another planet beyond our little solar system?

One solution is the generation ship. That's an enormous space vessel which contains everything needed to play host to several generations of humans, each one learning what's needed to keep the ship running from the generation before it. The people who board the ship on Earth become the ancestors of the people who, a varying number of generations later, arrive at the new star system.

Of course, something always goes wrong. (It wouldn’t be much of a story if everything the author had to say could be summarized by the sentence, “Once upon a time, Captain Doe and her crew boarded a great starship; 10 generations later, their descendants all arrived safely.”) There is some kind of disaster—the AI that runs the ship goes crazy or just breaks down in spite of all the fail-safes, often due to human error or fecklessness; those feckless humans decide to play politics with the life of the entire crew and stage a coup, or else they fall prey to illness; basically, something goes so disastrously wrong that the ship’s passengers no longer have the wherewithal to direct or properly maintain the ship, often descending, over the course of many generations, into totalitarianism and/or barbarism and even forgetting that there is a universe outside the ship.

The main good reason, in my opinion, that this trope is much beloved in science fiction is that the ship becomes a claustrophobic little petri dish teeming with humanity’s best and worst traits, duking it out for the highest of stakes. It’s like the classic writer’s workshop exercise where you take two characters who hate each other, put them in an elevator together, then have the elevator break down between floors—but times 10,000: often the ship’s passengers are the only humans alive anywhere, after some apocalyptic disaster on Earth, so the entire fate of our species is in their hands. It’s a grand way of putting human nature under a very uncomfortable microscope, and of giving characters and situations enormous scope within their universe, while keeping the universe down to a manageable size.

This is very much the case in An Unkindness of Ghosts. Ms. Solomon’s generation ship, the HSS Matilda, became the entire universe to its inhabitants so long ago that its passengers scoff at the idea that they *are* passengers, or that there ever was or could be anyplace else besides the ship. Now it’s run a lot like a plantation society; the upper decks are the domain of a light-skinned and very privileged ruling class, while darker-skinned manual laborers with no rights live below. Males dominate, and there is no law other than harsh moral restrictions which are applied however the current dictator and his goons care to apply it.

We enter this society through the person of Aster. She’s a healer—in whatever free time she has when her shifts working the farming levels are over. She’s tremendously intelligent, resilient, and resourceful. She’s also, it becomes clear pretty quickly, not neurotypical—it’s never spelled out as such, but she seems to be somewhere on the Autism spectrum. She’s also not typical when it comes to gender or sexuality, even within her own very rich and diverse lower-deck society, in some parts of which it’s standard to refer to all children as “they/them” rather than “he” or “she” until they’re old enough to declare their gender.

The culture of the lower decks—or I should say the cultures, plural, because, as I just mentioned, there is quite a bit of diversity among the numerous decks—is what makes this book fascinating. Yes, Aster has to discover the clues her long-disappeared mother left her and figure out how to lead the ship to its destination. Yes, she does this while facing incredible deprivation, being preyed upon by guards for whom inflicting gratuitous cruelty is just a perk of the job, and dealing with her best friend’s frequent and violent psychotic episodes. Yes, there’s a romantic subplot (though not a traditional one), and a dictator you’ll desperately wish to be overthrown.

But all of this happens in the context of her society, which is deeply informed by the collective trauma of its enslavement, but which has also very unapologetically shaped itself in whatever ways it sees fit. In order to survive, yes, but also in whatever ways it finds beautiful or important or simply desirable. It’s not monolithic—as in any society, some folks are true believers in the morality of the upper classes and some are scoffers, some are genuinely good and some are selfish and cruel, and some have internalized the deeply scarring belief in their own sub-humanity of their so-called superiors more than others. But it’s a culture with its own language (and its own accents and dialects within that language), its own food, its own legends, and its own mores. And it’s fascinating.

If you have never read a generation ship story before, this is a great place to start. And if you feel like the trope has gotten stale, this book will change your mind. I highly recommend it for adults and mature teens. And I particularly recommend the audiobook version, if you like that sort of thing; Cherise Boothe does a truly magical job of bringing all the voices and accents to life.

  

First Year Out: A Transition Story by Sabrina Symington

First Year Out is a thinly-veiled primer on what it’s like to be a trans person. It’s about a trans woman, Lily, and her struggles and triumphs during her first year “out” as her true gender. She spends a lot of time explaining things to her mother, who has all the struggles with Lily’s gender one would expect a loving but pretty clueless parent to have; she experiences dysphoria as she has to deal with getting rid of facial hair; she goes on dates and talks to friends.

Throughout, the dialog is a bit clunky and the pacing is clearly about ticking off all the items on a list of Issues Trans Folks Face. It’s not great literature, and it’s not beautifully drawn. But it’s a fine example of what it is, an educational book candy-coated to make it palatable.

A good book to hand to your loving but somewhat clueless relatives and loved ones who need to learn the basics of what being trans means; it's well-calibrated for folks who aren't very in the know, aren't invested enough to want to read a bunch of scientific literature, and/or have fairly basic questions that they don't quite know how to ask.

Protector of the Small: First Test by Tamora Pierce: #tbt review

This is another book that my kid fell in love with when I would have thought they were too young for it, because I was listening to it in the car. With hindsight, I can see that they loved the heroine's strong sense of justice and her refusal to fit into prescribed gender roles.

Plus Tamora Pierce has done a great job of world-building here. If you're a fan of fantasy but you haven't read any of her books yet, you should—and this one would be a great place to start. It comes after the Song of the Lioness series and makes numerous references to storylines and characters from it, but someone who hasn't read that first (as I hadn't!) won't be at all lost.

As this novel begins, because of the pioneering work of the great Lady Knight, Alanna the Lioness, girls have won the right to go into service as pages and become knights. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Keladry of Mindelan is the first one to attempt it, and she learns very quickly just how stacked against her the deck is.

Not only is the system itself unfair, but on top of that, she immediately ends up on probation because of the actions of a bully. She has to work so much harder and overcome so many more obstacles than any boy… it would be so easy to give up. 

But she’s always wanted this, and it seems at least one person in the world believes she can really do it: a mysterious benefactor keeps sending her expensive gifts that are exactly what a page needs. Plus, Kel has never been able to abide a bully. Something has to be done about this one, or he’ll be able to get away with hurting her friends, too.

This is basically the story of the first girl going to a West Point-type military academy, only in a fantasy setting. Keladry lives out the maxim that a woman has to be twice as good as a man to be considered half as good. It’s a good introduction for middle-grade kids and younger teens to this sort of story, and Kel is a compelling character—she makes mistakes and has bad days but her determination and her unwavering protectiveness of those who are taken advantage of by others who are stronger keep her going.

The author, Tamora Pierce, originally studied psychology with an eye toward doing social work with teenagers. But she became a full-time writer instead in 1992, and I'm glad—I'm sure she has reached a lot more teens with her writing than she could have as a social worker.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

Narrated by George Guidall

This is the 1969 novel that won both the Hugo and the Nebula and made Ursula K. Le Guin’s reputation as a science fiction author. It asks a simple question--What if people were neither male nor female?--and a number of corollary questions, including What sort of society might that lead to?, and How would such individuals view us?

The setting is the planet Gethen, which was originally settled by humans who, for reasons long lost in the mists of time, decided to run a genetic experiment and create human beings who were neither male nor female. Gethenians are neuter most of the time, but every 26 days they briefly go into a state called kemmer, when they experience sexual desire and become either male or female, depending on who else is nearby in kemmer and how their kemmer is manifesting. At that point they are fertile and can either fertilize an egg or produce one and become pregnant.

The protagonist who sees all of this is Genly Ai, a lone emissary from a loose confederation of worlds called the Ekumen. Genly’s task is to convince the Gethenians to join the Ekumen--but he must do so without any show of military or technological might (because that would be coercive), and indeed without any companionship of his own kind at all, or any really convincing proof that the Ekumen actually exists. He’s completely on his own.

On Gethen he’s also considered a deviant, a perverted sort of freak, because he is always, by their lights, in kemmer. And he has a great deal of difficulty understanding Gethenians and their culture, because, as he says to the one friend he makes on that planet, he grew up in a society where one’s sex is, in many ways, the most important thing about a person, defining or strongly influencing what sort of person one is, one’s capabilities, one’s point of view, and even one’s ethics. On a planet where there is no gender and sex is fluid, persisting in thinking of neuter individuals as either male or female seriously handicaps Genly’s ability to get any real grasp on the culture, on whom to trust, on how people are actually reacting to him and how to influence that.

So, plenty of strikes against poor Genly, and of course things go south. Badly. Fortunately he has, in spite of himself, made one friend, though it takes him a very long time to realize it. The question is whether that will be enough--to save his life, and, more importantly, to accomplish his mission.

Le Guin does a lot of exploring in this book that may seem old hat to us now--and more that we still haven’t done much of yet in our culture. As with any science fiction book, it’s as fascinating a picture of the society the writer lived in at the time as of the society it depicts. With Le Guin’s keen and curious intellect behind it, it’s no wonder that this What If tale caught so many people’s imagination. It first caught mine when I was in my teens, and thirty-odd years later, it still doesn’t disappoint.

Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler

Imagine waking up in a cave, alone and horribly injured and with no memory of anything that happened before you woke up. First you just have to survive from one minute to the next, then from one hour to the next, and eventually, from day to day. But you don’t have the luxury to just focus on healing; if you’re going to survive, you need to learn who wanted you dead, and why.

This is how Fledgling opens. Our protagonist is a remarkable, intelligent, strikingly self-possessed and resourceful young woman who also happens not to be human. A creature of some kind wanders into the cave where she lies injured and alone. She kills it with her bare hands, eats it, and begins to heal immediately—and that's how we learn that she’s not only a vulnerable girl who is in terrible danger, but is also capable of being very, very dangerous herself.

This is Octavia Butler’s last novel and, in my opinion, her masterpiece. It’s a work of literary fiction that starts out as a mystery, then becomes a vampire novel, then a work of science fiction—and finally it wraps up as a courtroom drama. Butler doesn't so much transcend genre as bend it to her formidable storytelling talents. And the story is hugely entertaining and tightly-woven.

This was my second time through this book, and I’d forgotten just how good it is. Butler was such a master. Here she explores her usual themes of what it means to be female and black, the nature of humanity, what it does to people to be “othered,” and what it does to people to do the “othering.” She does this absolutely seamlessly, in the context of a gripping story set in a very recognizable California among very real people.

So much literature is tough to chew on and hard to digest. Butler’s work reminds one that there is literature—meaningful, multilayered, deeply intellectually satisfying writing that leaves room for as much thought as the reader wants to bring to it—that is also a pure pleasure to read. The concepts are laid out in a gorgeous, stimulating feast that also happens to be perfectly nourishing. 

Read this book! It'll never, ever make it to the screen, for reasons that will be obvious to any reader but which I won't spoil for you here. So if you want the story—and you do—you'll have to read it. If you'd rather be read to, the audiobook version, narrated by Tracey Leigh, leaves absolutely nothing to be desired.

If you still want more convincing, read this review—it’s fantastic.

An Excess Male by Maggie Shen King

read by James Chen, Tim Chiou, and Elaine Kao

Set in a near-future China where the problem of “excess males” caused by a combination of the one-child policy and parents’ preference for boy children is being solved by making “advanced families” (two or three husbands sharing one wife) the norm, this book tells the story of a two-husband family considering “going the max” by marrying a third man, and that of the man being considered.

The little family has secrets that would be safer without adding another person to the mix. One of May-Ling's husbands has autism, and the other is "willfully sterile," meaning gay. Both of these conditions are, if not technically illegal, certainly punishable, and must be kept hidden if their child is to thrive and everybody is to survive in relative freedom. But those selfsame secrets make the marriage untenable, in the long run, for two of its members. That's why they're even considering adding a third husband to the mix.

Meanwhile Wei-Guo, our eponymous "excess male," has, in his 40s, just managed to save up enough money for a dowry. He soon falls in love with May-Ling, to the consternation of his fathers, who are appropriately cautious about the match. They've heard rumors about May-Ling's husbands, and being a third husband isn't exactly a high-status position.

And then, of course, disaster strikes and everybody has to decide how committed they really are to their desires and to each other, and what kind of consequences they're willing to accept for their actions. Wei-Guo's talent for loyalty won't be enough to save anyone without a lot of help from an unexpected quarter.

This book is super absorbing, and as a bonus, raises all sorts of interesting points about gender roles, neurodiversity, the nature of love, and the meaning of family. Highly recommend.

The Power by Naomi Alderman

read by Adjoa Andoh

You've almost certainly heard one version or another of the famous Margaret Atwood quote: "At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them." What if women weren't afraid of men's violence anymore? How would that change things? Naomi Alderman, who became Margaret Atwood's protege in 2012, set out to answer that exact question in The Power.

I started reading The Power last December—but I deliberately stretched out reading it, and ended up not finishing it until several days into the new year, so I’m counting it as my first book of 2018. I was enthralled with it and kept wishing I was reading it with someone so I’d have someone to talk about it with. The whole idea of how the world would change if women were more physically powerful than men—if they didn’t fear men—how women’s attitudes would change, how they would speak differently, act differently—what that would mean on an individual level, to them, to families and religions and countries and regions and cultures and the whole future—I couldn't stop thinking about it.

One may wonder, sometimes, what it would be like to be another gender. But *this* is about how it might be if people remained whatever gender they were, but the whole power structure got changed—and that change started within each individual woman, one woman at a time, until it became a tsunami.

I can't say much more than that without spoiling the plot of this very plot-driven book for you. It's not just plot-driven; the characters, unreliable narrators all, were real and vivid and I couldn't stop worrying about what was going to happen to each of them next (and what was going to happen to the world when it did). But the plot, with all of its twists and turns and peaks and troughs and frustrations and epiphanies, is definitely the focus.

In short: everybody needs to read this book. Five stars.