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If I Was Your Girl: A Review

Earlier this year, I read If I Was Your Girl, and it is one of the most timely books I have ever encountered. Meredith Russo’s tale of a young girl moving to a new town is so much more than your standard teen romance.

Amanda just moved to Lambertville, a small Tennessee town where the big events are high school football games and church socials. She’s nervous about getting a fresh start for her senior year of high school, but she quickly makes a handful of friends. However, she’s hiding two big secrets. One, she attempted suicide while she was at her old school. Two, Amanda is transgender. Amanda is not expecting to fall in love, but encountering Grant, a young man with secrets of his own, leaves them both struggling to be honest with each other.

Amanda’s parents are separated, and she moves from a larger city where she lived with her mother to a small town where her father is still coming to terms with his daughter’s identity. If I Was Your Girl tells Amanda’s story almost flawlessly, interweaving flashbacks to her old life and helping the reader understand Amanda’s reasons for transitioning and her acceptance in her new home. Meredith Russo blends some of her own life experiences into Amanda. As readers, we’re shown an incredibly deep look. We see the psychological effects, glimpses into the recovery from the surgical procedures, and her experiences with a local support group prior to the move.

As has been mentioned in many reviews of this book, If I Was Your Girl covers a fairly easy take on transition. Amanda knows from a young age who she is, and has no trouble covering the costs of hormone therapy and various surgeries while she is still young. It’s an idealized version of transition, and it is important to note that this is currently quite rare in reality (I personally was waiting for tragedy to strike throughout my read, because everything seemed to be going too well). This is also noted by the author. “I’m worried that you might take Amanda’s story as gospel, especially since it comes from a trans woman. This prospect terrifies me, actually! I am a storyteller, not an educator. I have taken liberties with what I know reality to be.” However, this does not diminish the importance of a book by a transgender author, starring a transgender character, and featuring a transgender model on the cover in a year when transphobia is at a terrifying high.

All in all, I loved this book. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Is it perfect? No. But it’s a much-needed beacon of hope in what has been a very dark year for LGBT+ folks around the country.

November is Transgender Awareness Month. If you’re able to make a donation to GLAAD, please do so.

Want to read more like If I Was Your Girl? Check out Bookish’s list of 21 books to read for Transgender Awareness month.

Update: This review can now also be found here and on my goodreads page.

We Are The Meteor

“We Are The Meteor”

We are the meteor
We are bringing change
We will see the end
Of the dinosaurs’ reign

We are the meteor
We can not be stopped
We just pick up speed
And we’re coming in hot

We are the meteor
We are the reset
And you won’t believe it
When you see our impact

We are the meteor
We are bringing change
We will see the end
Of the dinosaurs’ reign

Stargaze

“Stargaze”

We spent the summer’s nights
Gazing up at jet-black sky
Pierced by fierce crystal
And deftly marbled with the
Swirling grasp of the Milky Way.
Hand in hand, we kissed, and
We wished
That we would be as endless
As all that we could not see.

A Plan

I pitched a D&D campaign idea to some of my old group the other day. Partially inspired by Overwatch and HBO’s new take on Westworld, I began to think about a party of warforged gunslingers (this would be a 3.5/Pathfinder hybrid game). There are enough archetypes within the gunslinger class to give a party of 5-7 players a few unique abilities. I think probably a single session, with a Seven Samurai/Magnificent Seven sort of plot. A group called in to defend a small village against an overwhelming force. I’m going to make this happen. It’s just a question of when. It’s always fun to have a one-shot ready to go should the opportunity arise.

A Door

Chuck Wendig’s latest writing challenge asked for us to share a real-life spooky experience. I decided to write a bit about something that happened about this time last year.

I’ve written a lot about doors. Secret passages, locked doors that contain various secrets, portals to other places… It’s definitely a recurring theme in my work. So imagine my surprise at finding something that wouldn’t be out of place in my work showing up in my apartment.

My girlfriend and I were moving in together for the first time, and we’d finally found an affordable place with enough space in the right neighborhood. We leased the apartment without looking at it, so we didn’t notice it when we first moved in. Not even when we were doing our walkthrough with the checklist the office had given us. Looking for chipped paint, broken blinds, etc. Maybe it was just the shift in lighting after we got the bedside lamp set up. Eventually, though, we spotted a small seam in the wall. There it was. A vertical line, a slight indentation too deep to just be in the paint.

“That’s weird.”

“Oh, damn. Yeah, it is. It’s like they patched the wall over here, and didn’t care that you’d be able to see a gap in the drywall. Weird.”

We didn’t think about it for a while after that. Occasionally, we’d smell smoke, though, like the next door neighbor was enjoying being in Colorado (despite lease clauses). Then, there was a revelation.

“Holy shit.”

“What?”

“Uhh… It’s not just a seam.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a door.”

“What the fuck?”

Sure enough, there was a second line running parallel to the first, about two feet over. Then we followed them up.

“Yeah. It’s a door. There’s frame here too, and look. There’s the lintel.”

“What the actual fuck?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it was a leftover from when the construction guys were building the apartment. A way between this one and the one next door without having to go back into the hall.”

“Then why would they frame it and then fill it in?”

My girlfriend even asked the leasing office about it. The agent who came to look at it had no clue it had ever been there. We pulled the bed away from the wall, and the lines ran all the way to the floor. It was unmistakably a door. Filled with drywall and painted, yes. But a door.

That was when we looked up at the ceiling and noticed the scratches in the popcorn ceiling. Gouges several inches long, spaced closely together, about a foot from the filled-in door. Another group of them a few feet away, nearer to the entrance to the bedroom. Almost like something had crawled across the ceiling from the door to the not-quite-door… Or been pulled…

 

 

 

Happy October, everyone!

 

 

 

 

An Invitation: A Vampire Haiku

“An Invitation”

Your gravest error
Was inviting me across
Your threshold that night.

Fort

“Fort”

My sister and I once built
A fort out of sticks and
Tumbleweeds, burrowing
In where they had blown
Against the row of pines.
We took snacks and water
And spent afternoons
Pretending to be explorers
Stranded on some distant
Island, though we had only
Once ever seen the ocean.

End of Summer

I managed to accomplish quite a bit this summer, and I’m almost sad to see it go. I survived (and thrived!) during an extra-long anniversary season of the Colorado Renaissance Festival. I attended my 10-year high school reunion. I blew past my Goodreads goal (granted most of those were graphic novels, but still…). I reprised my Kimblee cosplay at NDK over the Labor Day weekend. I met Shinichiro Watanabe and Dai Sato, and now I must re-watch all of Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo. I was recognized for five consecutive years of service to my library.

Not too bad, all in all. Here’s hoping for an equally productive autumn.

 

Fifteen Years Later

Half my life ago. Eighth grade, Tuesday morning. Mom and Dad were watching the news while my sisters and I were getting ready for school. All eyes were on New York as the planes hit. I remember getting to school and going to the library with the rest of my social studies class, watching the footage as the towers collapsed. Everyone was a mess of fear and confusion and anger and grief.

We shouldn’t forget. It does a disservice to too many to do so. But we should also learn. We need to remember that ignorance and fear and hate help no one. We have to find an understanding, realize that our differences make us stronger.

There are generations to come. Teach them that our divisions can be healed, that we can find common ground and grow to be better than we were. Do not forget how to love.

 

Magnetic Poetry #5

It’s been a while since I’ve done some of this, so here’s some fresh Magnetic Poetry for you.

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“my goddess
whispers a symphony
in a thousand languages
and I go to her
together always as lovers in
every moonlight dream”

Magnetic Poetry copyright information can be found here.