Pretend It's My Body

August 1, 2022
Blue debuts with an inventive speculative collection in which characters explore their relationships to their bodies in various situations of upheaval. In “Suzuki in Limbo,” set in the near future, a young woman named Suzuki tries to tell her family she intends to upload her consciousness to a computer server, so as to no longer live in her body, but before Suzuki can explain, her mother comes out as a trans man. Teenage Ted, who is exploring a femme identity in “Other People’s Point of View,” can read the minds of others, but only when they are being indecisive. In “My Mother’s Bottomless Hole,” set in the early days of Covid-19, a queer high school English teacher who wonders if she might be trans visits her hoarder mother’s house. The strongest entry, “A Full and Accurate Reporting” comprises diary entries from a Jewish woman who moves into the cramped Vilna ghetto in Lithuania during WWII. As the narrator discovers she has more and more space with fewer people around, her account morphs into a chilling meditation on history and trauma. Though the striking premises sometimes fizzle into lackluster conclusions, they are clever nonetheless. Fans of feminist and trans speculative fiction will enjoy unpacking these dark delights.

August 1, 2022
A debut collection of stories about characters on the brink of claiming new genders, sexualities, lifestyles, and even forms. In "Certain Disasters," a girl survives a tornado only to feel a "negative space" suddenly crack open in her that fills with masculine imagery and makes her crave a male body, while in the futuristic "Suzuki in Limbo," the protagonist returns to see her family one final time before she plans to give up her "meatsuit" and have her consciousness uploaded as computer code into an alternate reality. Not quite magical realist yet filled with magic, these stories perform groundbreaking work in their search for apt metaphors to describe moments of revelation for trans and queer people. Mind-reading is the magic in "Other People's Points of View," a story about Ted, a teenager with the niche ability to sense peoples' thoughts as they wrestle with decisions. It also perfectly conveys why it's hard for Ted to come out as a girl. In "Crush Me," a slightly less successful story, the sudden magical appearance of a growing number of boulders in a riverbed brings to life the narrator's consuming crush on her best friend, another woman. Blue writes with nuance, empathy, and wit about the complexity of gender and sexual orientation. The middle-aged narrator of "My Mother's Bottomless Hole," who realizes too late (from her perspective) that she wants to be a man, tells the high school students she advises in the Gay-Straight Alliance that bodies are like tattoos: "Yours mean a lot to you now because they're perfect, but eventually they'll be worn out and falling apart....Every adult has dysphoria. It's called aging." Blue's bigheartedness extends to all of their characters, even the mothers who struggle to understand their children's desires. That's the case in "Bad Things That Happen to Girls," a sneakily devastating story. Original work intent on creating new ways to imagine transformations.

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