Starred review from October 28, 2024
In this electrifying collection of three stories and a novella from Peters (Detransition Baby), trans characters explore desire, identity, and love. “Infect your Friends and Loved Ones,” the postapocalyptic opener, follows patient zero in Seattle during a pandemic that halts humans’ production of sex hormones. The narrator, once a loner in the area’s trans community, considers who she can trust. In “The Chaser,” an evocative coming-of-age tale, a boarding school junior forms a secret relationship with his femme roommate, Robbie. Peters expertly builds tension as the narrator questions his sexuality, rationalizing that he’s not gay because he’s not turned on by any of the more masculine guys in the dorm. The funny yet heart-wrenching title novella, set sometime during the primacy of steam engines and written in the style of a tall tale, may be Peters’s best work yet. When the boss at an illegal logging camp announces a dance, which anyone can attend as a woman, Babe, the strongest and ugliest lumberjack, taps into a long-suppressed yearning: “I had many times wondered in earnest about being courted as a woman.” In the unsettling closer, “The Masker,” Krys attends a trans feminine gathering in Las Vegas. When one guest arrives in a full body silicone woman suit, Krys contemplates who counts as trans and what she is willing to sacrifice for her transition. Peters explores her characters’ conundrums with striking honesty, revealing how they’re bound by indecision and insecurities from finding happiness, and she exhibits spectacular flexibility with language and form. It’s a marvel. Agent: Kent Wolf, Neon Literary.
February 1, 2025
Peters, a PEN/Hemingway Award winner for Detransition, Baby, offers a new book consisting of a novel and three novellas, one featuring a lumberjack dance, another spotlighting a secret romance between roommates, all focused on identity. Prepub Alert.
Copyright 2024 Library Journal
Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
January 15, 2025
Three long stories and a short novel by the author ofDetransition, Baby (2021). In her debut, Peters told the story of a trans woman and her ex-lover--formerly a trans woman, now living again as a man--building a family together with the latter's new partner, a cisgender woman. Tender and funny, the novel was a critical and commercial success. This follow-up volume is a lopsided collection that the author wrote over the course of 10 years. The opening piece, "Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones," is set in a hellish future in which a pandemic renders humans incapable of producing sex hormones. It's also sort of an antiromance centered around two trans women who are inextricably connected, despite what the narrator might wish. In "The Chaser," a boy who's reluctant to acknowledge his own sexuality embarks on a secret relationship with his boarding school roommate, the results of which are disastrous for both of them. "The Masker" is a darkly intense interrogation of identity and desire centered on a "sissy" boy who is trying to figure out if they are a cross-dresser or a trans woman while being pulled in different directions by a charismatic fetishist and an overbearing trans elder. Babe, the protagonist of the longest piece, Stag Dance, fells trees for an outlaw logging operation. Remarkably large and prodigiously ugly, he discovers a self he hadn't recognized before when the camp boss declares that there will be a stag dance--a rustic soiree at which some loggers volunteer to be women. Babe is a terrific character, and his relationship with the prettiest boy in the camp is nuanced and affecting. This could be a crackerjack short story, but it feels interminable at novel length. It's repetitive, and the old-timey jargon loses its charm pretty quickly. Peters might think about trimming this down to a taut tall tale and venturing deeper into the world she's created in "Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones." Even when Peters' experiments don't pay off, it's exciting to read an author willing to take these risks.
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February 1, 2025
Award-winning Peters's latest book is a daring collection of four short pieces that resist easy categorization. The opening story, "Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones," is a dystopian fantasy in which a vengeful trans woman has brought on a gender apocalypse through a hormonal pandemic, while the last tale, "The Masker," is an erotic horror set in Las Vegas. In "The Chaser," the book's most affecting piece, an illicit affair between roommates at a Quaker boarding school leads to brutal consequences. Finally, the title piece, the longest and most esoteric of the collection, is a gloriously demented fable starring bandit lumberjacks who are invited to attend a dance as women, hoping to be courted by their fellow loggers. The implications are more challenging to unpack in this work than in Peters's previous novel, Detransition, Baby, but this collection hums with the same level of blazing insight and proves that she is an author of ferocious talent and range. VERDICT A provocative and recommended addition to collections.--Michael Pucci
Copyright 2025 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.