Tag: Intersex

Books

Book 871: Just Ash – Sol Santana

Geoff W

Book cover of "Just Ash" with Amazon Affiliate linkWhen 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.

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ARC, Books

Book 753: Voices of LGBTQ+ – Lynda Wolters

Geoff W

Book cover of "Voices of LGBTQ+" with Amazon Affiliate linkUhhh…. A for effort?

I said yes to this one when the publisher reached out with a review copy way back in July (it’s been a long year obviously), because it sounded interesting and was nonfiction.*

I was obviously going to come into it with some bias, as a gay man I’m clearly going to have opinions, but I’m also going to come into it with a lot more education and history knowledge, holding an advanced degree in gender, sexuality, and queer theory. And frankly my thoughts are divided on this book. Did Wolters do a good job of starting a conversation and representing the individuals she interviewed? More or less. If I were judging the book solely on this she would’ve gotten four stars.

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ARC, Books

Book 703: The Names We Take – Trace Kerr

Geoff W

Book cover of "The Names We Take" with Amazon Affiliate linkBy no actual planning on my part I’m posting this on the release date of The Names We Take, which never happens. To be completely honest, the publisher sent this to me months ago and I just now got around to reading it, but hey things work out for a reason.* I liked the idea of the publisher, Ooligan Press, which is a student run press at Portland State University that concentrates on Pacific Northwest Writers and because the blurb was interesting and they’d clearly spent some time perusing my blog I accepted the galley.

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Books, Quotes, Reading Events

Book 151: Annabel – Kathleen Winter

Geoff W

This is definitely one of the top three most beautiful books I have read this year. Not only is it well written, but it is well researched and really makes you think without making you struggle to do so. As I haven’t read any of the award winners for which this book was nominated, I can’t say my theory holds that the nominees are generally better than the winners, but that’s still my gut response.

Not that you would want to, because the book is fairly deceptively complicated, but if you had to sum it up in one line it would be the following:

“Sometimes you had to be who you were and endure what happened to you, and to you alone, before you could understand the first thing about it.” (67)

This is definitely one of the themes of the book, along with acceptance and surviving and any other number of things. And it doesn’t just have to do with Wayne/Annabel, but with Thomasina, Wally, Jacinta, and Treadway. And any of the other countless people who lived in Croydon Harbor and are survivors.

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