Six is 6'7," scheming to rejoin the starting lineup, and barely checks her phone. Green is 6'1," always building her brand, and secretly jealous of her more famous girlfriend. Together, they're going where no Asian American trans woman has gone before: the men's pro indoor volleyball league. Our hot girls with balls just thought playing with the boys would spare them some controversy—ha, ha. In between their rival teams' away games across the globe, Six and Green stay connected on SpaceTime and selflessly broadcast their romance to fans on their weekly Instagraph live show. After a long season, they'll finally reunite for the championship tournament, the first to accommodate in-person fans since the COVID pandemic struck the world a year ago. Just as they enter an airtight bro bubble of the world's best, they're faced with a crisis that demands an indisputably humiliating task: make a public statement online.
Hyper-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.
An exciting entry into the internet novel lineage, one that succeeds in replicating the feeling of living, loving and majorly losing online ... The perfect conceit for a novel ... The success of Hot Girls With Balls comes from the delicate yet hilarious ways in which Nguyen deals with contemporary issues ... If this sounds like a heavy premise to some readers, they’ll be happy to find that Nguyen’s internet slang-laden prose inverts all of this pressure, highlighting the absurdity of societal biases and making fun of those who hate while secretly fetishizing the people they claim to loathe ... The heart of this novel is a love story that shows the humanity behind the image.
Nguyen dazzles in her riotous debut ... With agile prose and tongue-in-cheek humor, Nguyen delivers sharp insights into the pressure trans people face to justify their identities and gender presentations. This bold novel hits as hard as a spike to the face.
