PositiveThe Brooklyn RailCastro expertly renders a claustrophobic, sometimes funny, sometimes frightening study of consciousness ... The ‘plot’ is skeletal. The real drama is interior ... Reading Muscle Man is deliberately uncomfortable ... No word is out of place, but no word offers relief ... The novel’s third act, its strongest.
PositiveThe Brooklyn RailHyper-stylized ... A novel that skewers internet culture with its own language ... Nguyễn perfectly captures the exhaustion of online discourse ... But it’s here that Hot Girls With Balls mirrors other recent novels obsessed with social media...it knows the internet is vicious and profoundly flattening, but the analysis stops there ... Six and Green often feel more like influencers than real people ... With this approach, Nguyễn teases questions about where the persona ends and the human begins but doesn’t provide enough of the latter for readers to answer ... Still, Hot Girls With Balls delivers a satire that defies every expectation of trans fiction ... More spectacle than solution, but its horny humor and ruthless ear for digital language constantly delight. Its world is bizarre yet familiar ... In a voice entirely her own, Nguyễn proves she can get you hot, but she may not get you off.
RaveChicago Review of BooksThe lewdness and brutality underscore the near-fantasy world conjured in Stag Dance. The language is thick with early-twentieth century slang ... Seductive, dazzling, and history-making once again.
