Akiva Reads

by Isaac Fellman

4.5/5

I wasn't at all sure I was going to like this, but by about a third of the way through I realized that I really, really cared about these characters. Quotable, smart, messy, all over the place, but in like a tight neat well packaged way (I am a sucker for that kind of story). There are a lot of thoughts I want to return to here.

A few reviews bring up that it doesn't make sense to have both the metaphor (vampires) and the things it's representing (death, disability, transness---less so Jewishness, I agree that wasn't as well incorporated) in the same story, but I would argue that they're not metaphors, they're riffing on each other. What Fellman is trying to get at are instead the things that are common to all of them (and ultimately all of us human beings) in different ways and at different moments: contagion, rot, fear/disgust/desire, limitation, anxiety and coping with risk, legacy.

April 2026: Reread partly because of the several reviews I've read since that are wigged out by the (poor) ~representation~ of butches and I wondered if I'd missed all that somehow. I can squint and see it, there are the two butch characters of five recurring characters total (the other three being two trans men and Elsie) and those two are the less sympathetic/more antagonistic. But it's a small number of characters in all, and maybe it's also that I'm in my late 30s and I don't need every book to represent every type of person equitably (anymore!), it's okay to tell a less unimpeachable, messier story, which doesn't cancel out other stories.

Meta: The archive was haunted by a specific version of Tracy, the one she'd been while working on Feet of Clay and in a particularly indecisive point in her life, and the later version of her Sol sees at the end in the photo is more decisively a butch woman and more handsome for it. As Sol tells Florence, "There are so many directions you can take that desire. I think---I can't know---that Tracy chose none of them, and that's why she was unhappy." ....Ohhh, and now I see the Sol is lampshading Florence's gender stuff. Florence would be less bothered by Sol if his existence didn't hit so close to home and if she felt more secure in her own gender choices. And that's yet again an indictment of readers who are bothered by the characters' (gender) choices....

Also noticed the similar ground that Biography of X treads, so maybe there is something to the similarities of X and Tracy in personality and profession and assholery, and that the two authors chose to pair that with gender nonconformity. ...Or! Maybe we've gotten a lot of literature about how masc men and femme women can be manipulative assholes, and these are filling in the much needed GNC manipulative asshole representation.