Book 871: Just Ash – Sol Santana

When I stumbled across this on NetGalley I knew I wanted to read it.* That book cover has Boston (including where I actually live) on it, it’s an own voices LGBTQIA story, and it happens to be released in October and set in Salem, I mean COME ON how could I NOT request it. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite live up to my hopes for it. Maybe they were too high to start because the book started out strong but puttered out by the end.

Just Ash is the story of Ash who has spent their entire life as a boy who happened to have both male and female parts, but in the opening scene gets his period and a series of horrible events follow as he is forced to pretend to be a girl by his parents for some time until he finally sets his foot down.

There was so much of the story that was horrifying and frustrating, but that was Santana’s point. Ash’s lack of agency and society’s lack of flexibility or understanding of someone who didn’t fit into a neat little box. They got this point across really well and drove it home continually. Where this was most powerful, however was when Ash joined an Intersex support group after running away to his sister’s in Boston. The range of experience and condition type really opened Ash’s eyes to show that he wasn’t alone in the world.

We were the Contemporary Witches of Salem, after all. Two outcasts unable to blend in, unable to fit the mold. The kind of people you blamed when the social order got disturbed, when the rye grew mold and rotted people’s brains. I didn’t need to be a historian or an anthropologist to know that three centuries wasn’t long enough to change human behavior. (Chapter 10)

The love story aspect was adorable and served to reiterate Ash’s maleness and male identity, but overall was a bit clunky. The way both Ash’s parents and Michelle’s (the love interest) parents treated them and their relationship and sending Michelle to gay conversion therapy just weighed the novel down. I get what Santana was trying to do, in reiterating that by forcing Ash to live as a female it made Michelle’s parents scared she was a lesbian and it was a viscous cycle of homophobia and genderphobia and misogyny and ugh.

We all know I’m super cautious about reading books set in a city I’ve lived in or visited frequently, because it’s so easy to be pulled out of the story by an erroneous or glaringly wrong detail. Thankfully, the author clearly knows Salem and Boston which was a relief after reading Quietus and having it rip me out of the narrative with how badly laid out the city was in their book. There was one major error in this book which did make me say WHAT?! Ostensibly, this is a contemporary story with cell phones and game developers, so at the oldest we could say late-90s, but I really imagined it to be more 2010s. So, it really stood out to me when there was passing reference to the Orange Line being above ground. I’ve lived in the city since 2009 and the Orange line was never above ground (centrally) in my time being here. It took me all of 5 minutes to verify that the section the author referred to was moved underground in the late 1980s, so well before this book could possibly have taken place.

‘Humans are incredible,’ Trina said on a sardonic exhale. ‘Keep coming up with new and creative ways to hurt each other. You’d think after two hundred thousand years, they’d run out.’ (Chapter 17)

In the end what really put me off about the book was how Ash dealt with one of the major crises of the novel. I saw it coming pretty early on, but gave the author the benefit of the doubt and don’t get me wrong, I 100% understand he did it out of self-preservation. However, after his own experience of persecution and everything he went to in order to gain agency over his own body to do what he did and say what he say just left me with a bad taste in mouth. It just felt so underhanded and manipulative and rather than use it as an opportunity to try and build a bridge or form some sort of understanding to be so cold and calculating and threating it just hurt my soul.

Recommendation: In general I felt this was a solid read. It trailed off toward the end and didn’t have as much of an impact as I hoped it might when I first stumbled across it. I wasn’t happy with some of Ash’s decisions, but I really feel that Santana wrote a genuine story that highlighted many issues intersex individuals face and the challenges society continues to throw in their faces from medical and social issues to love, family and friendship. I truly wish the ending were different or there were an epilogue bridging some divides as Ash got older for hope and looking to the future, but that’s on me, not the author.

*I received a copy of Just Ash from the publisher via NetGalley in return for my honest opinion. No goods or money were exchanged.

Opening Line: “As soon as I walked through the front door, I knew there was no escape.”

Closing Line: “The more of it you gave, she said, the more if it you had. ‘And I think we’re going to need a lot of it. It’s just a feeling.'” (Whited out to avoid spoilers, highlight to read.)

Additional Quotes from Just Ash
“Years ago, a local video game dev created this low-specs MMO called Salem Online. You played it with a dozen other people, friends or strangers, and your job was to figure out which of the players were witches and execute them. If you were playing as a witch, obviously your goal was to outsmart everyone and live to the end of the game. It was a pretty fun game, more strategy-based than something like Minecraft. (Chapter 7)

“‘Salem’s the home of freaks and weirdos,’ I said. Somehow I was the freakiest of all. Maybe my freak flag was different because I couldn’t take it down at the end of the day.”  (Chapter 11)

“We walked to Washington Street, which looked just the same to me as all the other streets, except that at one point we crossed underneath noisy, suspended train tracks, the Orange Line zipping above our heads. Finally we stopped in front of a large church whose façade looked gold in the descending sun. A single round, kaleidoscopic window hung above the double doors.” (Chapter 17)

“Many intersex people and allies have advocated against surgeries to alter the genitalia of intersex children before they are old enough to consent. But this long-standing practice continues, as do misconceptions about intersex conditions.
Our bodies are unusual, beautiful, and constantly challenging the rigid world we were born in. They do not deserve to be mutilated or stigmatized merely because they make some people uncomfortable.” (Author’s Note)