sighĪlso, did I mention this book is gross? It’s pretty gory and there’s a lot of sexual and sexualized violence that is not easy to read and doesn’t always feel like a part of the story. There’s also weird comments on Blackness, and while a prominent Indian character is very well-written, there’s a Central American character who seems to only exist to give fierce anti-white feminist speeches in broken English. The lone non-monster man is Indigenous, and the descriptions and dialogue about him are really strange. I felt very much like an outsider reading this, but in a good way, mostly.īut on the other other hand–like a lot of books written by white women, this misses the mark pretty often when it comes to descriptions of race and culture outside of the white Bostonians who make up the central cast. (It also reinforced a lot of very binary, hyper-patriarchal, white Western thinking about gender that I didn’t really get down with, but in its own cultural bubble, I guess it works.) It ratchets the experience of bigotry and the fear of gendered violence up to eleven, and makes some scary points that lead to introspection and conversation. We’re living in a time of increasingly toxic gender discourse and bigotry and this expressed the fear and alienation that a lot of trans people must be feeling now very effectively. There’s a certain genius to just how monstrous this world is, and it made me genuinely uncomfortable at times. All the cis people are rabid bigots or literal monsters and trans people are caught in the crossfire, constantly defending themselves? Good plotting, vivid images, and characters that fascinate even when you can’t stand them.īut on the other hand, c’mon now. War ensues, with two very different trans women–Beth and Fran–taking center stage despite their difficult personal relationship.

Instead of banding together to protect themselves from the monster-men, an alarming number of the cis women are TERFs and make it their mission to hunt down and eradicate the remaining trans people out of pure spite. The only people left are women and a few trans men who weren’t on T when the pestilence hit. In the near future, a plague turns anyone with high testosterone into a literal violent, dangerous, disgusting beast. On the one hand, it’s a gender parable wrapped in dystopian horror. I’m not sure I know what I think about this book.

In the interest of practicing what I preach, before you read this review, I’ll direct you here and here to two reviews by readers that made me consider my perspective a little more closely.)

(EDIT: I tend not to read other reviews before I write my own, and it’s come to my attention that there are a lot of trans readers and writers that have very pointed #ownnormal critiques of this book.

Manhunt gretchen felker martin