This has been sat unread on my shelves for years after a burst of enthusiasm I had for buying the book. I always thought it would be too heavy and philosophical and that I'd have to force my way through the book, but it was actually a lot easier to get to grips with and understand than I imagined.
I'm in a big phase of trying to read books that have sat on my shelves for years because I've lost interest in reading them, and this is one of them. I thought from the title and because it's a teen book that this was going to be a fairly slow paced gentle read about a summer adventure, but it was far from that. The book comes with a big trigger warning for sexual assault and suicide.
I mentioned this a few posts ago, but this year I'm really trying to diversify my reads to include more books with LGBT+ elements. This book has the most in-depth insights on the experience of being trans than I think I've ever read. It was well written, with an interesting plot and I'd recommend it if you want to read more fiction written by a trans person about being trans.
Detransition, Baby is a novel centring around three main characters: Ames who has detransitioned to live as a man, has accidentally gotten his cis girlfriend Katrina pregnant, and calls upon his ex girlfriend Reese to help make a non-conventional family. Reese is a trans woman who longs to be a mother, and when Ames realises that the idea of fatherhood makes him too dysphoric, he asks Reese if she wants to step in to act as a parent. The book looks at Ames' struggles as someone who has detransitioned, the idea of motherhood for a transwoman vs a ciswoman, romance and sex as both a transwoman and ciswoman, and navigates this all very sensitively but with clarity.
I enjoyed this book. It's not like anything I've ever read before, and was very informative about the experience of being trans, detransitioning and dysphoria. I did find that the book was a little lost genre wise: there was almost enough romance for it to fit into that category, but not quite, and it almost felt like literary fiction, but the plot was too dramatic for that, and so it sort of jarred between a few different genres. I also didn't really enjoy that a lot of Ames' story was told by Reese. We heard Reese's theory of why Ames detransitioned, but not Ames' himself, and I really felt like his voice was lacking in the novel.
I gave this three stars because there of the reasons above and because there were a few parts of the book that dragged a little. I thought the conversations around being trans and being a parent were very interesting, and I really enjoyed the story of Reese's past and present. The book was very touching and I would definitely recommend it.
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I love a good historical fiction novel, but this one didn't hit the spot for me. I thought from the blurb it was going to be a book partly sent in the present part, part during the Tudor period, but it was a modern day novel which looked at evidence from the Tudor period as part of the plot. I wish I'd known beforehand that it was more of an attempt at a thriller than historical fiction - I might have enjoyed it a little more.
