A moving meditation on fear, masculinity, and the power of coming out.
On the outs with his family, a young transgender man makes his way west to discover what masculinity means to him.
Ron Bancroft has always felt like a boy—his former life as "Veronica," a tomboyish basketball star, never felt right. But when he comes out to his parents, they refuse to contribute to his education at Harvard, and he's forced to withdraw from school in order to establish financial independence. Adrift from his family and ex-girlfriend, Ron travels from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Cody, Wyoming, where he chances into work on a ranch. "I was out West," Ron thinks early in the novel. "The land of the rugged individual. The land where you got a chance to prove what you were really made of. The land where men were men, or they got the hell out of town." Set in the early 1990s, Ron's journey to self-acceptance simmers with fear of discovery in the rural west. He shimmies in and out of a compression shirt, takes pains to shower when no one else is in the bunkhouse, and—against his better judgment—falls for outspoken Cassie, a horse wrangler and co-owner of the ranch with her brother Gus. When Ron is outed by Cassie's malicious younger brother, Marc, he's fired and set adrift once more, this time with a target on his back. Myers (Revolutionary, 2014) has written a compelling coming-of-age novel even as he occasionally veers into more pedantic territory. "I don't want being transgender to limit what I can do and where I can go," Ron writes in an application for financial assistance for LGBTQ teens. "I have to stand up and live as who I am, with the expectation that people will treat me decently." With care, patience, and courage, Ron mends relationships new and old, ultimately coming to find a home in himself and his chosen family.
A moving meditation on fear, masculinity, and the power of coming out.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-60801-169-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: UNO Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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