Pleasurable, challenging, politically aware, gender-defying, surprising, spectacular. With a kind of built-in soundtrack. It's been a while since I've read a book I so thoroughly enjoyed. ( )

2017. Spoilers: novel about Paul who can change sex at will, becoming Polly. Paul is gay and Polly sleeps with women. This strange gimic is used to delve into many queer communities: Iowa City, Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, Provincetown, New York, and San Francisco. Sometimes read as if it was my own life, my own mind. Very on the nose. Smart, cultural critique. Too much drinking and sex for my taste. Aids looms omnipresent as, no doubt, it should. Great soundtrack. IYKYK. ( )

I absolutely LOVED this book. It so wonderfully captures an era!

I made a playlist of all the music references in the book in order of appearance: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2XCkP9ePvB5OaLAEAm1WDR?si=58ec4095ebb048a8 ( )

Okay, um. Yikes. I really didn’t care for this. It seems like people really loved it so I’m gonna go ahead and say that I’m probably missing something. Stopped at 13% ( )

This novel reminded me of two other contemporary novels, [b:Black Wave|32800012|Black Wave|Michelle Tea|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1477665260l/32800012._SY75_.jpg|45065501] by Michelle Tea (who blurbed this novel) and [b:Heartland|34466598|Heartland|Ana Simo|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1492481283l/34466598._SX50_.jpg|55586708] by Ana Simo, because all three challenged me in the same way.

All three are written in a careful-breezy style--by that I mean, the writing is quite careful, and in many instances beautiful and poetic, but the voice is crafted to give the impression of near-artlessness.

All three are also about social relationships that aren't within the heteronormative and/or cisgender experience, and as such they occupy a space where relatively few novels live, as yet. Authors writing about the cis-het experience can employ all kinds of shorthand in their writing, it seems to me, because readers are already trained to the 'beats' of cis-het relationships in fiction. When almost every novel you've ever read is about cis/het people, then you develop, as a reader, the experience to anticipate almost every possible outcome in relationships between characters. Because the authors of these three novels are interested in exploring non-normative relationships and characters, though, their novels have a lacy quality to me, where I can't see the pattern in relationships from the beginning, and where I have no expectation of what's going to happen next. I was a little lost, fictionally-speaking. It was kind of wonderful.

Just now this novel is my favorite of the three. I thought it was the best written and the most daring. I recommend all three of them though. ( )