viola
This book meant so much to me when I was searching desperately for trans lit that felt like it was for trans people, not cis people. I'm glad teens now have more and better.
a modern and vital engagement with the chthulhu mythos meditating on the relationship between rage and destruction, community and creation, the countervalence of hypervisibility and invisibility with threat real and perceived
i didn't find the titular story as sharp as it definitely had the ability to be. the lumberjack perspective was great though (and hearing Torrey Peters read some of it live was hilarious)
babel; or, the necessity of violence
love me a book with a secret alternate title
succeeded, if bluntly, on many points. however, i feel that the key part of revolutionary politics is building solidarity—which it felt like this novel undermined precisely by making silverwork a single point of failure that could be toppled by a few, rather than requiring unified class action. this made the politics feel overall unrefined, despite the solid underlying messages
why did the robots dedicated to throwing off vestiges of humanity, in a book dedicated to queer teens, keep binary genders????????
unfortunately the part the author was most interested in was not that interesting, and the rest really wanted to be baru cormorant
