A review by shelby1994
Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters

adventurous challenging dark informative tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0



""Reese spent a lifetime observing cis women confirm their genders through male violence. Watch any movie on the Lifetime Channel. Go to any schoolyard. Or just watch your local heterosexual drinking in a bar. Hear women define themselves through pain, or rage against the assumption that they do, which still places pain front and center. Hear the strange sense of satisfaction when they talk about the men who have hurt them - the unspoken subtext of it being "because I am a woman"".

This book swung for the fences in every way, and I loved it. .  At it's heart, this book is about what it takes to build a family; a family is made of parts joining together and bringing all of their faults and messiness to the table.  Family can never be a zero-sum game, and neither can gender, and the sooner people come to terms with that, the more we will be able to connect with one another and build new ways and communities that reflect how we actually want to live out our lives. 
 I would be selective in who I recommended this to though.  Everybody should be diversifying their reading, and one of the most important ways to do that is reading a VARIETY of trans-stories, written by trans men and women themselves.  However, just like in every other genre, people are going to have their preferences in style, narrative voice, plot, trigger warnings, and the amount of violence or sex they can handle.  I have a very high threshold for all of those things, so those elements served to accentuate the emotional arc of the story instead of distract from it. 
I would recommend to anyone who likes unvarnished protagonists who yearn for things out of their reach, and also anyone who really enjoyed "Luster". 
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