4 Good Books from May
Detransition, Baby | My Year Abroad | The Office of Historical Corrections | Missionaries
Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters (2021)
This is the story of three women (two transgender and one cisgender) thrown together in an unplanned effort to raise a baby. Ames and Reese are exes who always planned to start a family, and Katrina is the mother-to-be of the child Ames accidentally sired after detransitioning back to a man.
When Ames reconnects with Reese in an effort to find out if three unprepared co-parents are better than two, personal baggage and self-sabotage fly from every corner. It’s a fun story and the first I’ve read with multiple trans characters, a necessary point of view that we need more of from all publishing houses.
The Office of Historical Corrections: A Novella and Stories by Danielle Evans (2020)
Evans’s magic is the ability to develop characters over a short number of pages by letting us in on a moment where their fears or desires or prejudices are laid bare to themselves.
Six stories that deal with politics, racism, marriage, and motherhood set the stage for the title novella, a twisting tale of race relations that chillingly feels like it was ripped from the headlines.
My Year Abroad by Chang-Rae Lee (2021)
My Year Abroad finds Tiller, an unremarkable but impressionable college student, on an international caper that is all wonder and excess. It’s a far cry from the life he unceremoniously chucked to take off with his new mentor, Pong, a King Midas-like businessman.
From a retrospective angle replete with dark humor, we find Tiller washed up on the other side of this trip, trying to reconcile his witness protection-like domestic situation with the antics in Asia just months before.
Missionaries by Phil Klay (2020)
Klay first caught my attention with his National Book Award-winning story collection, Redeployment. A Marine Corps veteran, he brought the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq home through the eyes of young male characters who had to learn one way to live on the battlefield and another upon returning.
With Missionaries, his first novel, he takes the same keen understanding of the human consequences of war and shows how the fight for freedom in the Middle East is the same fight against drug lords in Latin America. The tactics and the location change, but the scars look the same.
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