A complex transgender love story that mixes selfishness and compassion.
A woman grapples with a new reality after her husband comes out as a transwoman in this detailed debut memoir of marriage and transformation.
Collier was a happily wed mother leading a normal life with two children and a loving husband named Fred. When a fire ruined their home, Collier and her family were safe, but the tragedy seemed to mark an ominous beginning to an even bigger change: Fred confessed that he wanted to live life as a woman. Thrown into a spiral of doubt and fear, the couple struggled to find the tools they needed to survive. When one therapist believed Fred’s aspiration was merely an episode of past trauma that needed to be worked out, Collier was relieved, but it turned out not to be the case. Finally they discovered true help, and Collier’s spouse found her new name, Seda, and herself. But the author was distracted by the larger questions that such a transition imposed upon the couple: would they have sex? Was Collier now a lesbian? What had become of the husband she loved so dearly? As Seda evolved, Collier had to define her family anew, co-parenting and coming out as the wife of a transwoman. Eventually, the couple decided to physically separate, with Collier falling in love again. Despite these adventures, the author returned home to Seda, where they created a new definition of family upon the foundation of the love that they started with. Collier, a natural storyteller, delivers detailed dialogue and engrossing scenes, including “snapshots” of her memories over the years. While she explicitly wants to write a book for the partners of transwomen, the memoir threatens to capsize under its own self-centeredness in the face of Seda’s transition, which can be painful to read. There are moments of grace when Collier finds empathy (“Who was I to tell him how to live?” she wonders), but it takes several chapters for the author to embark on her own journey, which gives Seda enough space for hers. The chaos of watching these characters form a family again is all the more tender when others, such as Collier’s mother, express love for Seda. A glossary of terms and an offering of resources attempt to ground this memoir in service rather than exploration.
A complex transgender love story that mixes selfishness and compassion.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Abbondanza Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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