┌| ∵ |┘♪

★★★☆☆ – Good!

You know that feeling you sometimes get from academic literature – the feeling that the author, at some point, realized that the book is their soapbox? “This is my book – I can write anything I want in it!” This book gives off that feeling, for better and for worse (but also for better!).

If you, like me, are a 21ˢᵗ-century trans woman, the history contained in this book will, for the most part, not pertain to you directly. My gender identity is not an ethnoreligious phenomenon, I’ve never been a sex worker, and I was but a glint in my grandfather’s eye in the ’60s. Nevertheless, the history detailed in this book is eminently interesting, and offers a perspective on transfemininity (and its interaction with mainstream society) that may be illuminating and useful – it certainly made me question some of my basal assumptions.

It is my view that in order to create something truly special, one must be “radically different” for some value of that phrase. And if you are as “out there” as is required to create something special, I believe, you will necessarily not only make decisions that resonate with your audience as something special, but some decisions that will simply go down as “mad” as well. A necessity of making something great is to make something questionable. This book is a prime example: For every part that makes you question your place in society, there’s a part where the author recounts an entire music video, or goes on about nothing for six paragraphs. The final chapter of the book might make you – it certainly made me – feel like you’re being inducted into a sex-radical female-supremacist cult. The very final sentence – “Will you demand it all?” – struck me as particularly discombobulating. Because overall, it isn’t that kind of book.

When you read a book on gender theory – especially one written by a marginalized author – there’s always a risk that it’ll be angry, isn’t there? Righteously so, but nevertheless the sort of book you shouldn’t read if you aren’t at the top of your mental game; the sort of book that’s upsetting even if it’s right. The sort of book that induces angst in the vulnerable. A Short History is not that kind of book. It’s mixed in its digestibility, sure, and the coherence of its arguments isn’t always readily apparent (as in, I wasn’t always sure what arguments it tried to make) – but it’s level-headed and informative (if more than a bit florid and high-falutin’). You certainly don’t risk anything by giving it a try.

★★★☆☆ – Good!

The Glass Prison is a Jacqueline Rayner novel, through and through. It has a light touch (despite its heavy subject matter), it’s eminently funny, and it’s decidedly more about its characters than its concepts. Make no mistake – despite an eponymous location that smacks of “high concept” as much as a “glass prison”, the ramifications of this odd setting aren’t explored so much as used as a source of emotional turmoil for the characters: Characters which, thanks to Rayner’s effortlessly human style,* are always immediately relatable; never impenetrable.

Exploring Bernice Summerfield’s pregnancy and labor, you would expect this novel to be a profoundly angst-inducing affair – and it does seem like something Rayner aims for! But she isn’t an author who writes spiraling psychological narratives: She writes fast-paced, (non-derogatorily) digestible, intuitive stories. When Bernice Summerfield worries whether her baby is truly hers or not (it’s some science fiction mumbo and/or jumbo), you never wonder on which side she’ll come down in the end – though that meshes with the tone of the rest of the book.

As nestled in my heart, Jacqueline Rayner is a comfort author. You get a good story, you’re never bored, and you aren’t too challenged. It’s the ultimate refinement of the “popcorn literature” that you expect a licensed novel to be. That’s not to say that she can’t write in a higher register – but I wouldn’t imagine that’s the mission statement here. Rayner writes quintessential Bernice Summerfield – she has a pitch-perfect grasp on her sarcastic, messy character, while assiduously maintaining the reader’s emotional connection to her. Of course, by virtue of her being one of the few female writers who consistently get work in the Doctor Who extended universe, you suffer no risk of running into chauvinism in her writing, and as a bonus, this particular novel centers on a cast of nigh-exclusively female characters – a breath of fresh air.

An odd feature of this novel is the passive nature of its plot – Summerfield and her gang are profoundly reactive. You would think a prison break would be an obvious feature of a novel named The Glass Prison, but… it barely is! They seem perfectly content doggin’ it in there.

If you, like me, are interested in immersing yourself in Bernice Summerfield as a franchise, this novel is a key inflection point. It chronicles the birth of her son, who goes on to be an important character in his own right, it’s another step in Bernice’s perennial will-they-again-won’t-they-again relationship with her (ex-!!!)husband Jason Kane, and it features a new angle on Rayner’s own pet alien species, the fact-obsessed, tentacle-faced, and deeply tickling (as in amusing, not with their tentacles, I— oh, forget it) Grel. It may also offer you some consolation as to why Bernice Surprise Summerfield’s son has a name as exasperatingly prosaic as “Peter”.

The audiobook version adds the value of Lisa Bowerman’s brilliant performance – who knew she commanded such a range of voices?

* Have you listened to Doctor Who and the Pirates?

★★★☆☆ – “Hey, I had a good time tonight.”

A theme park ride of ideas.

Rose-Coloured Crosshairs is, in a sense, the Platonic idea of a Faction Paradox novel(la). When I say that, I don’t mean the Platonic ideal, mind – that being perfect, absolute, and eternal – but the Platonic idea: The most essential form; an embodiment that zeroes in on what “a Faction Paradox novel” is, free of extraneous features. And when I say “in a sense”, I do mean a specific sense: It manifests what I had heard Faction Paradox was like before I got into it. Quote Elizabeth Sandifer, in her essay on A Romance in Twelve Parts, Obverse Books’s first Faction Paradox publication:

[Faction Paradox] is a series and a mythology defined by setup and by the generation of ideas, as opposed to by their deep exploration and resolution.

Never has this been truer than in this book. Rose-Coloured Crosshairs is a guided tour of ideas; a safari of titillating notions; a theme park ride with concepts in place of animatronic characters. It never stops to explore these concepts in any depth, but they certainly get to strike their cool poses and put on their pyrotechnic displays as you ride past. Notably, the premise to which “rose-coloured crosshairs” refers –  a device placed on a planet in life’s infancy, which (over the course of the planet’s whole remaining multi-billion-year history!) brainwashes people into remembering a false past and “progress [thus] becomes impossible, as [nostalgia denies] any possibility of change” – smacks loudly of a message; of a point the author wants to make… but that point is never made, as the effects of the device never enter the story.

It’s difficult to be too disappointed by the lack of depth, however, because Rose-Coloured Crosshairs makes a good bid at compensating with quantity. I found myself lost and quite honestly bored for the first third of the book, which consists largely of meticulous, dry worldbuilding descriptions (as if out of a sourcebook for a tabletop role-playing game) and slightly too inscrutable exchanges between unfamiliar characters. Barring some hitches in the pacing, however – Bidmead likes frontloaded descriptions (though at least I always had a vivid image of the scene) – the rest of the book flew by: The Macy’s parade of ideas gets into the swing of it, and I’m sure I audibly let out an “ooh” and/or “ahh” on at least a few occasions.

Some of the concepts are a bit too fuzzily defined for my tastes (“vibes-based”, as they say, or sometimes “things just kind of happen”), but again, it’s not a great loss if a given idea doesn’t speak to you, since you’ll be on to the next but a few pages down the line. Unfortunately, the central plot of the book is characterized by this fuzziness as well; a general feeling of “what just happened and why?” In the end, I’m left feeling more as if I’ve read a single-author anthology than a novel(…la), but the inescapable fact of the matter is, I like an anthology. Do you?