... compassionate and convincing ... Peters weaves together this multifaceted cast in ways that leave the reader empathizing with each one even as they undermine one another. Her characters are so vividly drawn and human that the reader comes to feel personally close to them ... Peters doesn’t shy away from exposing her characters’ flaws. Nor does she shy away from an original plot. As Katrina’s pregnancy progresses and the characters shift in their desires and identities, we remain hooked on their every word. Delivered with heart and savvy, their deliberations upend our traditional, gendered notions of what parenthood can look like. By the end of Detransition, Baby, questions remain unanswered, but still the reader somehow feels satisfied.

... dishy, engrossing ... the story moves seamlessly from present to past ... prickly, funny Reese is the star of the show. Her casually devastating assessments of other characters and her sardonic narration lend the novel its insider chattiness. It’s full of the kind of talk that trans people would normally reserve for one another ... Peters’s invocation of detransition, a relatively rare phenomenon commonly cited to claim that trans people are delusional, has an air of menace to those invested in shifting transphobic attitudes. But, in refusing to avoid the sore spots of trans life, Peters offers a lucidity that would be impossible if her only goal were to inspire sympathy. She is refreshingly uninterested in persuading the public of the bravery and nobility of trans people, and lets them be as dysfunctional as anyone else.

Peters is not patronising ... Peters’s mastery of plot and pacing allows her to move easily from descriptions of the effects and logistics of hormone replacement therapy to passages about the politics and pleasures of sleeping with ‘tranny chasers’ to discussions of the near impossibility of adopting a child as a ‘double-trans couple’. It’s about as open and accommodating as a novel can be ... The naughtiest thought I had while reading was that the novel recalls the work of Jonathan Franzen ... If the novel sometimes approximates the gossipy melodrama of chick lit, then perhaps it could be considered ‘radical’ in the way a trans woman becoming a Brooklyn basic might seem radical. But Peters is up to something more interesting. (Devious, even.) The book is full of swaps, reversals, projections and scenes that challenge the conventional wisdom of the left while simultaneously provoking transphobic crusaders of all political persuasions ... The most daring of Peters’s interventions belongs to the basic outline of her plot: it’s a story about two queers who try to convert a straight, cis woman to a queer lifestyle ... To be clear, I think this is very cool ... Detransition, Baby is a book ‘about’ trans women, about varieties of trans experience, but it is also a story about the possibilities and limits of what Peters calls ‘affinity’. While she links transition with divorce throughout the novel—which is dedicated to ‘divorced cis women, who, like me, had to face starting their life over without either reinvesting in the illusions from the past, or growing bitter about the future’—she also articulates what happens when you run up against someone who is not like you.

Peters often aims her barbs at transgender people like her ... Peters doesn’t just eviscerate, though; she also eviscerates the impulse to eviscerate ... The novel’s ending could be construed as a cop-out. And yet the denial of closure functions as a note-perfect withholding of moral clarity. Reese, Ames and Katrina can’t be slotted into a typical happy ever after nor into its opposite ... that rare social comedy in which the author cuts people up not to judge them, but to show how we fail to fit together.

... vivacious ... a book that merrily skewers straight and queer orthodoxy alike. Savvily constructed as a breakout novel, Detransition, Baby is almost certainly the most buzzed-about book in the history of transgender fiction. And it’s terrific: smart, socially generous, a pleasure, a gift ... What initially seems like an absurdist Shakespearean gender-play plot isn’t that at all, it turns out. It’s instead a feasible proposition, certainly not the first alternative family structure ever dreamed up, but perhaps the first of its kind to appear in literary fiction. Peters explores the cross-cultural frictions it sparks with meticulous nuance and terrific wit ... challenges the anti-reproductive No Futurism of early-twenty-first-century radical queer politics ... Those who are already fans of Peters—author of two audacious novellas written explicitly for other trans women as part of a trans counterliterature—may balk, as I did, at the idea of bourgeois values and the domestic sphere intruding upon her fiction. But the other side of it is this: the installment of trans lives and trans concerns into the arena of women’s literature—and the nuclear family. In any case, this is the same Torrey Peters ... With precisely zero interest in making her characters paragons of respectability, Peters joins a school of novelists (e.g., Alissa Nutting, Ottessa Moshfegh) who revel in the unruliness of resistant women ... The novel’s concerns with trans futurity are centered within a feminist reproductive justice framework. Abortion, miscarriage, IVF, adoption, the history of forced sterilization—all are handled with agility and grace ... Equal parts loving and eviscerating, our narrator knows all and withholds little. If her knowingness can become at times overbearing, it’s a function of her role. Indeed, the novel is so rich with social commentary one could almost miss the soundly built plot whirring softly in the background ... Peters’s brilliant novel blasts through the gates to claim more space for trans futures in fiction.

Detransition, Baby arrived with a tremendous weight of expectations on it. It lives up to them ... The squeamishness that Detransition, Baby inspired in my friend is earned. The book lays bare many of the innermost thoughts I’ve had as a trans woman, from my desires to my anxieties to fears I barely know how to name ... I can’t say that I share every single one of the characters’ preoccupations, but I shared enough of them to feel deeply seen, roughly every other page ... By running straight at this tension — and by making Ames perhaps the most intriguing character in her book — Peters tackles something I’d only trust a trans novelist to take on. Whatever anxiety I’d initially felt about the novel centering in large part on the life of a detransitioner melted away the second the character’s inner life came into view. Peters is too deft a writer to turn Ames into a political hot button. He is, instead, someone just trying to fumble his way through a life that has afforded him very few good options ... Peters has somehow channeled the lives of nearly every trans woman I know. In particular, she’s excellent at highlighting how Reese’s trans identity blinds her to the ways in which her whiteness affords her privileges she might not consider ... Peters’s dialogue sometimes clangs, and I’m not sure Katrina is as fully realized as either Ames or Reese. But Detransition, Baby is a terrific read in spite of these small flaws, one that looks at the trans experience in modern America unflinchingly, in ways that made me feel seen and made me feel horrified to feel so seen. If you are a cis person seeking to empathize with trans women, this book wouldn’t be a bad place to start. Just don’t try to talk to me about it without clearing out your calendar to give me time to vomit my every innermost anxiety in your general direction.

Peters simplifies nothing, explains nothing to the outsider, which is why she is treasured by readers who are also protective of her and her work ... Detransition, Baby embraces the reality that relationships, especially romantic or familial ones, place people with different styles of gender into conflicts of interest. By forcing this idea into narrative form, Peters fashions ordinary conversations out of what is often either screamed online or left unsaid ... Writing through the particular confusions facing trans characters seeking love, however, lets Peters show that fiction as an art form has a relationship to fiction as a misrepresentation ... Provocation, in her hands, becomes a method for inviting such misrepresentations into the work. The word detransition performs just this function ... A nonsensical exhortation embedded in a vaguely sexualizing form of address, somewhere between a catcall and B-movie dialogue, the title Detransition, Baby turns out to be a flash-bang strategy for confusing the oncoming reader ... Detransition, Baby has a conventional plot, as far as novels go, and its satirical bite invites comparison to novels of marriage and self-sabotage like Mary McCarthy’s A Charmed Life or John Updike’s Couples. Like those writers, Peters takes swipes at the bad ideas in her way, but only in order to formulate different ones ... This is an artful book, and in it, Peters creates a literary style out of the particulars of gendered misunderstanding ... The white-hot and scandalizing effect of Detransition, Baby burns all whose fascination compels them to reach out and touch.

... simply put, fantastic. But somehow even the most complimentary adjectives feel insufficient to describe Torrey Peters’...novel, as they cannot adequately capture the experience of spending time with her characters, who are so fully realized and complex that the truth seeps out of them from the first page ... Peters takes the reader on a vivid trip through the characters’ backstories to show how they have arrived here, adding intricate layers to every moment. She displays a masterful control over this story, offering a psychological deep dive that is still entertaining thanks to the potency of Reese, Ames and Katrina. The vivid supporting cast is equally as endearing, as not one side character seems to understand that they are not the lead. Devastating, hilarious, touching, timely and studded with fun pop culture references and celebrity cameos, this is an acutely intelligent story about womanhood, parenthood and all the possibilities that lie within.

... strikes to the heart of the moment. This conversation-shifting, taboo-busting novel is set to catapult its author, Torrey Peters into the mainstream ... Her themes could hardly be more timely ... a nuanced, New York-set portrait of trans feminine culture that challenges preconceptions of motherhood, family and misogyny ... irreverent, zeitgeist-nailing quality, without diluting complexities ... a bracing study of perspectives ... starkly illuminates the courage required to live as a trans woman, for whom the simplest interaction is fraught with the potential for abuse or ridicule ... Detransition, Baby should be on your reading list. It’s an exuberant novel of ideas, desire and life’s messy ironies – all filtered through Peters’ astute, witty characters.

Perhaps Detransition, Baby is the first great trans realist novel? Witty, elegant and rigorously plotted, Peters’s book breezily plays with the structural conventions of literary realism ... sexually peppery, though also casually self-instrumentalising, cliches may or may not charm the reader—they did this one—but Peters’s remarkable skill is to divert our attention from the cliche to the mode of self-narration in which it moves and has its being ... The portrayal of detransition itself is tender rather than mawkish, Ames’s motivations admirably ambivalent. Detransition, Baby makes a careful distinction between 'being trans,' which it treats as a condition of desire, and 'doing trans,' a set of actions and protocols that have simply become too exhausting for Ames to continue ... Peters’s novel approaches the well trodden topic of baby fever, and although it renders the specificity of trans community and subjectivity in vivid, electric prose, its real appeal is much wider.

In true Despentes fashion, Peters tosses the reader a helmet and instructs her to climb on for a bitchseat ride into the big city. For the reviewer, Detransition’s contemporary Brooklyn is a familiar one, full of friction and stickiness. There are heated conversations between exes in Prospect Park, recollections of Hey Queen!, and an amiable sex worker joke or two that left me radiant (and hoping all the more that someone passes this book onto Despentes). There is ample queer drama; all traversed with an adult grace that Detransition’s characters are grateful to experience ... It’s all deliciously femme, though not without self-critique. Some of the novels’ bitterest pills, literal and figurative, are thrust at the ganglions of Peters’ hard-headed sisters; call it Estradiol and Come to Jesus. Yet any true ire or embitteredness is directed at the cismen with whom trans women often engage out of necessity, nevermind their insistence on demanding a femininity that quickly becomes asphyxiating ... melancholic but liberating, the novel is further enhanced by Peters’ willingness to engage with the most undeclared of internal and external trans conflicts.

... a love story, a classic tale about how to build a family. It’s a huge, funny, heartbreaking romp of a book. It is also this year’s State of Queerness novel. Every year or so the publishing industry decides it’s time to give the gays everything they want: in one book only...This is an exaggeration, of course, and Detransition, Baby is about much more than gender, but the publishing industry’s refusal to grant a longer list of queer and trans novels is something we should all relish the chance to point out ... The novel takes a lot of stabs at explaining both Trans 101 and trans embodiment. In this way it has an appeal to both straight people and for trans people in its poignant moments of, as one character describes it, 'gender-feels.' This is a strength and soft spot for the novel. Its characters think. A lot...Sometimes it can feel like the book wants to tackle every issue. But this is also, admittedly, what it can feel like to be a trans person today. Everyone has a take. And everyone thinks theirs is right. In this way, Reese and Ames are typical and even beautifully drawn ... Peters is incredibly insightful. Through her characters she is able to espouse and challenge many contemporary trans issues.

... discretion at the level of form, striking for a novel that generally makes a point of being unsparing in its characterizations. An uncharitable way of reading these moments of discretion would be to frame them as part of an elaborate narrative strategy to shield Reese—the trans woman for whom 'detransition' is not a specter—from the shadow of masculinity, and in turn to project myriad masculine-coded embodiments and experiences onto her doppelgänger, Amy/Ames ... This is not to say that Reese comes off in a flattering light by contrast. Far from it. But even her worst moments—when she sabotages herself, violates others’ trust, or voices retrograde views—generally can appear as 'feminine' sorts of mistakes ... The novel, to quote Reese in one of her more winning moments, 'remember[s its] own bullshit, thank you very much.' But it’s not just the novel and its protagonists who are fed a dose of reflexive self-criticism. Readers like me are also invited to reflect on the self-undermining quality of our own suspicion-laden interpretive practices ... As a social comedy, Detransition, Baby cuts to the core. But for those who might be inclined to take the characters’ extended metaphors and quickly improvised efforts at family-formation as crystallizing a shared generational conundrum, it’s worth holding in mind the extent to which the novel invites us to read with a jaundiced eye the foibles and formulations of its protagonists. The histories they tell, for better or worse, are of the semi-plausible sort.

A wonderfully original exploration of desire and the evolving shape of family ... Set in New York and peopled with youngish professionals (and folks who are, at least, professional-adjacent), this novel has the contours of a dishy contemporary drama, and it is that ... in Ames, she has created a character who does not conform to any hateful stereotype ... Reese is similarly engaging. She’s kind of a mess, but who isn’t? There’s no question that there will be much that’s new here for a lot of readers, but the insider view Peters offers never feels voyeuristic, and the author does a terrific job of communicating cultural specificity while creating universal sympathy. Trans women will be matching their experiences against Reese’s, but so will cis women—and so will anyone with an interest in the human condition. Smart, funny, and bighearted.

Peters’s sharp comedy...charts the shifting dynamics of gender, relationships, and family as played out in three characters’ exploration of trans femininity ... Peters conceives of a world so lovable and complex, it’s hard to let go.