RaveNew City Lit... breezy for 900 pages; readable twice in an afternoon. But while a quick read, it shouldn’t be mistaken for an easy one. Like many transgender narratives, it’s about untangling trauma toward a certain truth, but it’s also about the trauma created in the untangling ... Grove’s message is resonant, but it’s also worth noting how she uses the language of comics to deliver it. Grove uses simple but distinct character design effectively. Even when they wear the same wig, it’s easy to tell Katina’s goofy smiles or intense scowls from Emma’s gentle features. But more critically, early in the memoir Grove uses an empty black panel to establish a visual shorthand for a key aspect of Emma’s experience. Established before we (or Emma herself) realize exactly what the panel means, this shorthand not only adds value to a reread, its reveal gives us insight on the unmooring nature of Grove’s episodes. It’s an effective way of commandeering from us the sympathy that Toby refused to give Emma. Through The Third Person Grove is the sort of voice I hope will convince the public that trans folks deserve and warrant the care they are asking for, at the time and place they ask for it.
Jennifer Close
RaveNew City Lit... Despite the potentially heavy subject matter, Marrying the Ketchups is an exceedingly funny novel, full of quotable quips and absurd situations ... Bridging the gap between the novel’s dramatic and comedic elements is the novel’s character work. The Sullivans are likable messes. Their tendency for error lends itself to hilarity and their struggles are relatable ... The absurdity at the heart of Marrying the Ketchups isn’t that the world stops when glory or tragedy strikes, it’s that it doesn’t ... maybe the novel that has best captured the way \'Our whole country feels shaky and flammable at the moment,\' accomplished by vividly illustrating our last shaky and flammable moment.
Annalee Newitz
RaveNewcity LitNewitz’s good fight is unabashedly a feminist one, with an emphasis on racial and gender intersectionality ... The Future of Another Timeline might be the most political novel in a year that drops a Handmaid’s Tale sequel The Testaments, but it certainly disproves that issue-based science fiction needs to be less fun than supposedly \'apolitical\' adventures. It has a high quantity of fist pumping moments ... It’s so good in so many ways that I doubt we live in a timeline where it’s snubbed for a Hugo.
Kalisha Buckhanon
PositiveNewcity LitSpeaking of Summer is Trojan Horse literature, a deception planted by an unreliable narrator lying both to the audience and herself. Instead of delivering genre thrills, Buckhanon takes us on a walking tour of a breakdown ... At the risk of spoiling it, Speaking of Summer is a literary descendant of Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, except the defining trauma is buried in the far past rather than the novel’s central action ... When Speaking of Summer pulls the veil back from its foundational deceit, it’s far more interesting and engaging than the rote promise it leaves unfulfilled.
