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first picked up nevada in 2022 and i still remember feeling terrorized by the first page and having to set it down. the intensity of that first sentence, even, made me so scared. weirdly, it gets a lot less intense from there, or maybe it's just me.

i never got past the first chapter back then, but now it's 2025 and i have. it's kind of a hard read when you're trans, because it's hard to distinguish between the fictional story being told and something that feels more like the clouds parted and the transgender bible dropped from the sky and these are the quotes from it. it's hard for me to think of maria as a character in a way. to me, it's like if all of the shame and doubt and misery and confusion and apathy and care and truth and pride* of being transgender could be pressed on a vinyl record, maria could be the record player.

reading nevada is crazy because at first you're like, oh ive been maria. and then it's like, i think i also shared my first kiss with maria. i think i had a one night stand with maria. i think maria was my first friend after i moved to the city. i think i went on a dozen dates with maria from dating apps. i think maria checked me out at the thrift store. and then every fucking character feels that way too. but of course maria is all the characters, too. she knows that she was james. she probably also knows how she feels about james maybe exactly the way steph feels about her, which makes her steph, too.

i have to say, i dont think it feels intense again until the last 3 chapters when you realize there is no room left for our protags to figure out what theyre doing. i mean the whole time it's like, oh man are they gonna kiss? fuck? something else? and then turning each page closer to the end is like, oh god, it just ends like this, huh? i thought the dread imogen binnie made me feel here is almost worse than when the book started with me thinking maria was going to die. more than anything, i love when an author displays full control of what theyre doing, and binnie has such a command of the intensity it just wows me.

*does maria feel proud of being transgender? i do not invoke pride as in Pride but invoke pride as in the thing that makes you go into a walmart and tell a guy without a college education all about feminist and anarchist theory because youre so knowing and youre doing the right thing by telling him that identifying as an autogynophile is a shaky identity that comes from a shaky sex science and maybe you should really just come out and realize what you are already. (and once again, haven't we all been there? [ml, if youre reading this, im sorry])

quote: "You and me against the rest of the queer community, she says back, only she’s not really kidding."

truly the love story ever. hate to be the guy that mentions the movie in a book review but the movie is such a perfect adaptation of the book that you never need to read the book.

quote: This is true love — you think this happens every day?

i love to believe women but i do feel like in a book whose premise is the SCIENCE of all this, i feel like sometimes the author didnt totally substantiate things and could have turned off the reader, especially the more skeptical ones. testosterone rex by cordelia fine does way more of this.

riveting and a little all over the place! cool tho. learned a lot about eels and i loved the tone of the book just kind of stringing me along through the mystery of everything.

booooo slow and annoying. some characters have charm and some things i thought were cool explorations, like a young girl stumbling into a kinky thing with her much older professor, but to be honest i never felt much for the characters even when they were hurting their very most. the story might have been saved by the two fucking and wanting to kill each other but we don't ever get anywhere close to that.