sarah HANNAH gómez

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I am trying to contain my anxiety every time I go to GoodReads and see that there is no counter for how many books I’ve read in 2015. I didn’t sign up for the reading challenge this year and I’m not going to, because recording my reading in such a way has changed from convenient and fun to something I feel like I always need to top.

It’s bad for you. Really, really bad. As someone who is obsessed with data and organization (hi, I’m a librarian) but also prone to anxiety and compulsions, I need to try and break my tendency to view my reading in this way. So I’m not doing any challenges this year. I was going to do the YALSA ones, and I do highly recommend them, but I just can’t do anything this year. I need a break. For my health.

The other problem with GoodReads (and this one really is their problem, not the problems I create by being too obsessed with it) is that if you reread a book, it doesn’t “count.” That is, you can only have a book listed as having been read on one date or another, not multiple ones. So if you want to record that you first read a book 10 years ago but are rereading it today, you have to delete one of those things. Of course you can put the date in your review or something, but if you are like me and want your data to be accurate, it will be erased from the year you read it previously. That’s super bullshit. But using it as a reason not to reread things is also bullshit. Continue reading →

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I finally read the book that had been sitting on my shelf for ages, that I had suspected I would love but decided to avoid reading because apparently I don’t like being happy. I was an idiot to wait, because The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender (IB) by Leslye Walton is pretty fucking brilliant. Lush, lyrical language without being purpley in the slightest, a compelling story, and utterly perfect characters. A must-read, truly, and a book I hope will help the YA naysayers change their minds, since this book doesn’t really seem YA in the traditional sense and instead serves to further break down the idea that YA is anything (problematic, but also useful).

Senior year of high school in AP English, we read Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (IB) , and everyone but me booed or made fun of the ending. SPOILER ALERT: Milkman flies away. Literally. Figuratively, yes, but literally, because that’s slave legend, and literally, because that’s what the book says, and literally, because that’s how magic realism works. And nobody could accept it, even though there’s no reason in the world, or in the world of the novel, to doubt its truth. But because to most people who read or watch television or movies, “magic” is a thing that has to be explained ad nauseum as part of worldbuilding, or at the very least “taught” or “learned” or “harnessed” over the course of a story. In stories like this, it just is , and that’s what matters. Continue reading →

There are books that need to happen to pave the way for something, and you have to accept them even if they’re kind of shitty, so long as they’re not harmful. When it comes to being a trans person and having your life and identity more widely represented in YA or children’s literature, that means Luna by Julie Anne Peters, which is a literarily terrible book with piles of strawmen getting knocked over on every page. But it was what there was, and now, thankfully, there are other books coming out starring trans teens, like I am J or Freakboy . But when it comes to middle grade, there is basically nothing there, even though kids know early – very early – what gender they feel they are. That doesn’t mean they know their sexuality at three years old (though I would suggest that our idea that you don’t figure out your sexuality until about age 16 is like four to six years off), but to say that children don’t know who they are at their core is an incredibly insulting, and you know how I feel about adults who think children are stupid. Inexperience ≠ innocence ≠ ignorance (the first is what children have, the second is a fallacy, and the third can only be determined on a case by case basis and is not a given with all children about all things). Anyway. What I think is happening is that since everyone likes to conflate sex with gender with sexuality (maybe I should pull out more of those “does not equal” signs), nobody wants to put out a middle grade novel with a trans protagonist because they think that that will mean sexualizing children (oooh, another non-equation: sexualizing children ≠ children having sexuality – one is not okay, the other is true whether you like it or not), and GAWD FORBID we do that. So I was really pleased when I heard about this book that was forthcoming from Disney Hyperion, and I was so happy that they gave me access to it on Netgalley. I read it all in one day (yesterday), and I mostly really loved it.

Not everything is perfect about this book, and I feel a little ill at ease writing this review, because I can’t really gauge authenticity about an issue I can claim ZERO personal experience with and only a couple of friends/acquaintances whose experiences I have watched from a fairly far distance. And all those acquaintances happened to be FTM trans, and most books, I’ve noticed, focused on MTF, maybe because we like to conflate female-to-male trans-ness with tomboyishness and think that they’re the same? Or because we have more unease about men exhibiting feminine characteristics and therefore MTF narratives seem more subversive or scandalous? Or something else? No idea. Something to unpack at a later time, because I am digressing a lot. Continue reading →

what i still need to work on

january 2015 reading in review

take a deep breath

#liveuptoamericangirl

the best stuff of last year for you to try this year: mind

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