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4.02 AVERAGE
4.02 AVERAGE
Short, easy read but full of thought and emotion. I really liked it, and it gave me a new perspective on my own queerness.
reflective
sad
fast-paced
emotional
reflective
fast-paced
I can't place exactly why this didn't hit for me - I was very excited to read it and felt it fell flat. There were some political references - "feeling" poor after getting out of poverty, and a weird hunk late in the book about how white people who are poor/"white trash" and not ""really"" white (including a throwaway line of, of course white people benefit from white skin privilege, but..), and a few times where the author "know it's not 'feminist,' BUT.." - which sucked. There's an odd number of super academic quotes sprinkled throughout, and even though the author is 30+, the timeline essentially stops at 18 years old. There's also queer feelings/ideas but no depictions of relationships with anyone queer/anyone other than cis men. The most fun to read was 90s/2000s reference to pop punk and band shows and talking about how powerful music felt when discovering it.
Rust Belt Femme by Raechel Anne Jolie is an honest, smart, inclusive, sexually and politically empowered memoir. Jolie's memoir touch points are her tragedies and traumas, but not to dwell in them or to simply keep the reader turning pages. These traumas are quilted into Jolie's process of discovering herself--her smoldering anger, her evolving gender and sexuality, her revolutionary thoughts and activism. This memoir will stay stuck in your brain long after you finish the last page.
The voice here was so unique. The author illuminated her own self-identity development and experience which was not the more pervasive urban and white collar one, but instead suburban/rural blue collar. This is a generational novel, showcasing an experience that is probably only familiar to younger LGBTQ readers. There is struggle here, but it is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the same as the struggles of LGBTQ Boomers, Generation X, or maybe even most Millenials. This is the Generation Z experience. And it is a revelation not only of a different experience, but how that experience has created a different outlook and a different set of priorities, too.
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
medium-paced
emotional
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
reflective
slow-paced
challenging
emotional
reflective
medium-paced