Detransition, Baby: A Novel

Emotionally complex LGBTQ+ novel with in-depth characters. Really excellent read.

I'm an adult, and yet, I don't feel I'll ever be mature enough to have any thoughts about this book. Not when I'm 40, 50, 80 or even dead.
It's a masterpiece.

Honestly, if it wasn't for my book club, I'd have dropped this one. I'm not a fan of non linear story telling and I hate that every time I would get interested in a plot line, the author would cut away to a different plot line. I didn't really like the characters much, Katrina is ALL about herself. So she's announced her pregnancy to her friends, including one who is having trouble conceiving, but now she's going to abort it? I'm totally in agreeance that it is her body, her choice, but it's still a colossal dick move. Ames felt like the only character fully fleshed out, Reese was just a collection of attitudes and postures. And boy howdy was it misogynistic in places. Made my skin crawl a couple times.

Both loved and struggled with this one. What I enjoyed: intriguing, layered characters, some snappy prose and pointed observations of several NYC social scenes, very frank (why is this so unusual?) discussion of sex, exploration of so many themes - what it means to be a mother, a woman, class themes, the nature of desire, and of course what it’s like to exist as a trans woman today. What I struggled with: the premise (and therefore most of the plot). Ames to me was less developed among the main characters and I never felt like his need to have Reese as a co-parent was fully fleshed out. It felt to me like a forced device to bring these three characters together. And then because this novel is ambitious, and I’d venture in part because trans voices are so underrepresented, this novel had a lot of telling rather than showing. Portions were slow for me to get through, weighted by the explication. Ultimately really glad to have read this - and we had a fantastic discussion at my book club. As a half-Asian woman in business myself I was pleasantly surprised to see myself represented in Katrina, so I can only imagine how important this is as a small step towards trans representation (albeit within a specific subset)

The characters are not very lovable and the timeline is not super clear.