Monday, June 3 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books
Newly arrived in the Sonoran Desert, eleven-year-old Zoë Bossiere’s world is one of giant beetles, thundering javelinas, and gnarled paloverde trees. With the family’s move to Cactus Country RV Park, Zoë has been given a fresh start and a new, shorter haircut. Although Zoë doesn’t have the words to express it, he experiences life as a trans boy — and in Cactus Country, others begin to see him as a boy, too. Here, Zoë spends hot days chasing shade and freight trains with an ever-rotating pack of sunburned desert kids, and nights fending off his own questions about the body underneath his baggy clothes. As Zoë enters adolescence, he must reckon with the sexism, racism, substance abuse, and violence endemic to the working-class Cactus Country men he’s grown close to, whose hard masculinity seems as embedded in the desert landscape as the cacti sprouting from parched earth. In response, Zoë adopts an androgynous style and new pronouns, but still cannot escape what it means to live in a gendered body, particularly when a fraught first love destabilizes their sense of self. But beauty flowers in this desert, too. Zoë persists in searching for answers that can’t be found in Cactus Country, dreaming of a day they might leave the park behind to embrace whatever awaits beyond. Equal parts harsh and tender, Cactus Country (Abrams) is an invitation for readers to consider how we find our place in a world that insists on stark binaries, and a precisely rendered journey of self-determination that will resonate with anyone who’s ever had to fight to be themself.
Even as it shines light on the beauty and toxicity of Black masculinity from a transgender perspective — the tropes, the presumptions — Pretty (Knopf) is as much a powerful and tender love letter as it is a call for change. “I should be able to define myself, but I am not. Not by any governmental or cultural body,” KB Brookins writes. "Every day, I negotiate the space between who I am, how I'm perceived, and what I need to unlearn. People have assumed things about me, and I can't change that. Every day, I am assumed to be a Black American man, though my ID says 'female,' and my heart says neither of the sort. What does it mean — to be a girl-turned-man when you're something else entirely?" Informed by Brookins's personal experiences growing up in Texas, those of other Black transgender masculine people, Black queer studies, and cultural criticism, Pretty is concerned with the marginalization suffered by a unique American constituency — whose condition is a world apart from that of cisgender, non-Black, and non-masculine people. Here is a memoir (a bildungsroman of sorts) about coming to terms with instantly and always being perceived as “other.”
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