Black Iris
by Leah Raeder
If anyone else is curious why this is on some trans booklists, the main character is debatably agender/nonbinary, but it's not something she explores or names. That's honestly the only reason I wanted to read it, sooooo....
This review wound up being quite negative, but I didn't hate Black Iris. It was fine. It just wasn't my thing.
The prose is lovely, if verging on purple sometimes. The characters are transcendently horrible to each other---it seems that's the main attraction?---and it's strangely boring. It took me a long time to read, and a lot of concentration: I don't mind narratives that jump around in time, but the temporal markers at the top of each chapter were really unhelpful. Having both "February, last year" and "February, this year"? Help.
The descriptions of girl-girl relationships were actively offputting, and I'm queer. I don't have the book by me, but it's all stuff like "this is how women love each other, by being animalistic and territorial and destroying each others' possessions, it's so profound and primal and men will never understand." Diff'rent strokes, I guess.
EDIT: Oh look, one of my least favorite passages in the entire book was everyone else's fave. Whoops.
“Girls love each other like animals. There is something ferocious and unself-conscious about it. We don't guard ourselves like we do with boys. No one trains us to shield our hearts from each other. With girls, it's total vulnerability from the beginning. Our skin is bare and soft. We love with claws and teeth and the blood is just proof of how much. It's feral. And it's relentless.”
If that got your blood pumping, you should definitely read this book, because there's a pronouncement like that about every twenty pages.