Quest for Queer YA

This is by far my favourite of the trans memoirs I've read so far. These books tend to explore a lot of the same ideas and similar experiences, and although there's nothing wrong with them individually, I loved what new things Finding Nevo brought to the table. It explores more complicated feelings towards the body than most trans books do, whether autobiography or fiction, in a way that really resonated with me, and discusses other rarely explored topics such as loss of identity while passing. Anyone who wants to learn about the trans experience, whether trans themselves or not, would do well to read this book.

The quality of the prose was a very bare bones, recounting style. However, this doesn't impact the overall quality too much and did make it a very quick and easy read. 

On a personal level, I loved that this was written by a Jewish Melburnian. Nevo's Jewishness is an important part of their life, and it was wonderful to receive that affirmation that one can integrate being both trans and Jewish into their lives as I become increasingly involved in the Melbourne Jewish community myself. 

If you've read a few of David Levithan's co-authored books, this won't stray too far from what you're imagining. The writing is pretty good, although it meanders a little, and both authors spin some lovely turns of phrase. It's very queer, as in set in San Francisco during Pride queer, and our two protagonists are a lesbian and a gay man, with an almost entirely queer secondary cast. Media is often criticised for depicting queer characters in isolation, without a community, and the departure from that was very welcome.

Of the two point-of-view characters, I preferred Mark's storyline. Mark is in love with his best friend, with whom he has an ambiguous, unspoken, sexual relationship, but who ultimately doesn't return his feelings. This sort of relationship isn't depicted very often, particularly not while keeping both characters sympathetic. Some of Mark's experiences felt painfully true to life, such as feeling that he's not allowed to feel like he's been dumped, because they were never technically together.

Kate's character was also enjoyable, but her storyline wasn't handled as well. Violet and Kate have been in love through hearing about each other from Lehna, and get together very quickly upon meeting. Multiple times we find out about lies and exaggerations that Lehna has told about them to each other, and I expected that there would be conflict in them finding out about this and learning to like the real person, not the fantasy. This didn't really happen.

This is both a road trip novel and a trans novel, and I feel the combination put a bit of a new spin on both. It deals with a lot of the common themes of trans YA, such as transition and parental acceptance, but the road trip setting and plot allowed for these to be dealt with in new ways, and Jess' point-of-view added stakes and depth beyond the typical summer road trip novel.

I was so excited to read about a trans person who doesn't always pass. This is something that I don't think I've seen in much YA, with this experience being represented as yet to come, long past, or passing in the blink of an eye. As a trans person who doesn't generally pass, I am so starved for media that spends time focusing on this instead.

Jess begins the novel as a very selfish and oblivious character, obviously intended to be the start of an arc that would develop through the book. Connected to this are multiple plot threads, primarily concerning her relationship with her best friend Chuck and her father. However, the novel is terribly paced and essentially doesn't get around to resolving any of this. This is where things started to fall apart for me.

Jess is presented as being overly preoccupied with her transition, expecting support from her friend Chuck which she's not prepared to return and they spend the trip intermittently not speaking and failing to communicate. She's also oblivious about Chuck's feelings about his weight and how her own fatphobia affects this. 'Chunk', as he is called in the title and through much of the novel, is a nickname about his weight. This isn't explicitly addressed until far too late in the novel. There's only 20 pages left when Chuck finally brings up that he doesn't want to be called Chunk. This doesn't leave time for any believable character growth, although it tries to achieve this in its final scene. Jess apologises to Chuck, they kiss and the novel ends... and that's it? Clark didn't feel there was time to include specifically what Jess was apologising for, let alone a proper conversation or a more gradual realisation on Jess' part beforehand. Without this, it is not entirely clear what character development she is meant to have had.

There's also an ongoing comparison between being trans and  being fat. Comparisons are made between their discomfort with their bodies, and are obviously there to be made about Jess' feelings about her deadname and Chuck's about his nickname. However, like so much in this novel, it's cursory enough that I'm not entirely sure what it's even trying to say.

The timing of their confrontation also doesn't leave time to explore Chuck's behaviour. It is reasonable that he feels unsupported, but his frustration sometimes manifested in annoyance at her ongoing concern about transphobic violence and it's not sufficiently addressed that he outed her to his mom.

The entire novel builds towards Jess' confrontation with her father, but then it spends very little time on it. It raises similar themes to her confrontation with Chuck, focussing on her quick judgements of people and her unwillingness to listen to them. Her father criticises her for telling him that he doesn't understand her and refusing to educate him, and the novel doesn't do much to contradict him.  

Of the recent queer YA books out there with educational leanings, this is the one I like best so far. Such books fall on a spectrum (fittingly enough, giving Ash’s enjoyment of them) between personal stories and raw information. Which you prefer is up to personal taste, but the former seems to be more common, with books like Alex Bertie’s Transmission being primarily a memoir that includes educational resources. It did still include personal stories, including sections by many collaborators who experience the identities discussed firsthand. Nevertheless, this book veers strongly towards the opposite end of the spectrum and was therefore able to be much more in depth.

It is a common problem of resources like this that they are quite superficial in how they cover anything that comes after the LG in the acronym. This was not the case here. An emphasis was placed on gender, and it was dealt with before and in more depth than sexuality. I would almost recommend it for the section comparing bisexuality and pansexuality alone. I’ve been burned so many times before but this handled it really well.

I also really appreciated that the book never posited itself as definitive and it felt much more like the beginning of a conversation than the final word. It also admitted that some of what it covers is controversial material that the community is still working out how to feel about it. This was generally handled quite well, and it gave me some good food for thought.

It nevertheless wasn’t without its problems. It could have been much more succinct and clear. It’s also unclear if the intention is for people to read it from cover to cover or flip through it for particular entries, and it ultimately isn’t ideally suited to either. It’s frequently repetitive. The sections on ‘trans men’ and ‘trans women’, for example, were word for word the same, albeit for words like man being changed to women and so on. Some of this content could surely have been amalgamated. It likewise contains a glossary of identities and other terms, and then repeats many of these verbatim before exploring them in more depth. This would have been alright if it were at the back for reference, but it’s the first thing in the book, followed by an introduction and a section exploring what spectrums are that all could have been considerably shorter.

Many of the footnotes are also unnecessary and distracting. Frequently, they are just there to tell you that a term is in the glossary, which surely could have been achieved by bolding or underlining the term instead. They also often have whole paragraphs that would have fit into the body just fine. The overall effect was more distracting than helpful. The layout was quite poorly designed in general; the sections weren’t clearly delineated, the uses of bold and italicised text were unclear, and there was a lot of wasted space.

I was primed to love this book. It's about queer Jews. It's set in the suburb I live in. For these reasons alone, I'm delighted it exists. There is very little YA fiction with Jewish protagonists, let alone queer ones and what YA does exists about being queer and religious is often centred on a Christian protagonist who leaves or doubts their faith, or who wasn't that religious in the first place.

However, I have a lot of complaints about this book, and they can be summed up as me wanting more. This is the most bare bones prose I have seen in a long time. The book is set in my suburb; every time I go to the supermarket, I walk past locations it portrays. However, it never fully managed to evoke this setting for me, largely because of its unwillingness to spend much time on description.

Yossi's arc is of course his developing feelings towards his own sexuality, but this isn't explored enough for his actions to fully make sense, let alone be satisfying. When he decides to have sex with Josh, it seems that he had made up his mind before the encounter that this would happen, but the character development for this hasn't been earned. Similarly, when Yossi decides to initiate a sexual encounter in the very public space of the mikvah, it's hard to understand what he was thinking. This is an almost defiant move, but that doesn't make sense for Yossi, and I was left assuming that the author just needed him to be outed and couldn't find a less clumsy way to do it.

At that point, Yossi reflects on how far he and Josh have come, but it seems that this is ultimately about how far we are meant to have understood Yossi to have come in accepting himself. Josh is an interesting character, but he is ultimately there to move Yossi's character arc, and it is very unsatisfying. At this point, it does seem that Yossi has real feelings for Josh, and some of the best prose in the novel is spent expressing it. However, their sex scene is so  sparsely described that it feels deeply impersonal and ultimately meaningless, and their transition to being just friends after they are outed is dealt with in only a line. Josh is ultimately discarded for the last act of the novel, and it feels incredibly jarring.

This is especially so because Josh had the potential to be a truly interesting character. His family is poor and he is very critical of religion, but neither of these are developed passed what is required for Yossi's character arc. Josh also has a lot of thoughts about religion, and visits a gay-friendly synagogue, but these ultimately lead nowhere regarding Josh's own affiliation or identity.  

I am sympathetic regarding the difficulty of figuring out how to work in the exposition required make the Orthodox world accessible to a mainstream audience. However, because it is so short, a lot of the book is given over to this exposition, and because of the problems with character, it feels more like a generic intro to Judaism than a personal view of one boy's relationship to his religion. The climax of the novel, when Yossi makes a public declaration of his sexuality, takes place during a Passover seder (which is quite timely, given that we're currently in the middle of Passover) and Yossi briefly links his own coming out of the closet with the coming out of slavery that we commemorate with the seder each year. I would have loved if this sort of thing had been greatly expanded.

Jerome is a book that many wouldn't like. Its plot centres on the tropes of both the gay suicide and the homophobic bully who turns out to be gay. Marco, one of the two main character, is a heavily unpleasant one for most of the book. Although he is regularly pulled up by Kate, he is frequently and intensely homophobic, as well as sexist and racist for good measure. The n-word gets thrown around a few times. Published in 1999, it's a book that many would just write off as outdated in these aspects, just as with the characters' struggle to get their heads around email.

Despite this, I really care about this book. I read this book for the first time nearly a decade ago, and I always struggle to divorce such books from that time of my life. I spent some of my childhood and early adolescence in small town Australia, and the small town New Zealand setting felt painfully real to me, as did the characters and the relationships they formed.

Anyone who has read an Alex Sanchez book is aware of his foibles as a writer. His prose is flawed, his characters and the situations he portrays often lack nuance, and his attempt to write like teenagers is sometimes outright embarrassing. Boyfriends with Girlfriends has all these problems, as well as being fairly repetitive, with every romantic interaction being rehashed multiple times.

Despite these problems, I am inclined to like this book just because it is dedicated to discussing bisexuality, which so few young adult novels do. There are two bisexual characters, Sergio, who starts the book confident in his own sexuality, and Allie, who discovers her bisexuality over the course of the novel. Sanchez also includes a character, Lance, who starts off extremely biphobic. This is is clearly included in order to for the author to criticise such opinions and Lance moves away from them over the course of the novel.

However, it would have been nice if a little more time was put into that development. Lance seemed less like he had genuinely recognised and overcome his own prejudices, and more like he was willing to put them aside because of his romantic interest in Sergio. I am also hugely disappointed that the two bisexual characters never had a conversation at all, let alone about their sexuality. It seems like such an obvious thing to include this novel, and reading about two bisexual teens comparing their experiences would have been wonderful, but it apparently didn't occur to Sanchez.

The novel had the racial diversity that you can pretty much expect from a Sanchez novel, with Sergio’s family being Mexican and Kimiko’s Japanese. This is good, but wasn't always handled well. Sergio is described as “hot and spicy” because he's Mexican and much of Allie's attraction to Kimiko seems to be based in her fascination with Japan. The characters in this book ultimately aren't nuanced enough to not come across as somewhat flat and stereotypical.