![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
porticoI've been having a lot of trouble reading fiction for the last couple years, with the exception of when a friend posts about a romance that catches my eye and i buy/borrow it impulsively and read it in the next week. It's not helpful with my fiction-reading problem on account of how it's impossible to predict any part of it, but when it happens it is nice. It happened recently with Show Girl by Alyson Greaves.
The premise of Show Girl is that Alex is asked by James, his boss and maybe only friend, to crossdress and act as a booth babe for a tech convention that will make or break their little company. I went in thinking it would be gender fucky (which we love) but still essentially an m/m romance. I was wrong! Show Girl is much more about trans self-discovery and, well, transformation, than it is about romance (although the romance is there and it's very sweet).
Alex has always thought of himself as a cis straight man, and at the beginning of the book he struggles with comparing himself physically with his much more conventionally masculine boss, James. I enjoyed that Alex's journey was less "put on a dress and everything made sense" and more "put on a dress and now there's this onion of emotions to gradually unpeel." As an ace person who knew about asexuality and is not stupid but still needed someone to gently ask "have you considered that you might be asexual?" to put it all together I loved seeing a similar process unfold in Alex, who thinks that just because she wasn't born thinking that she was a girl that she must not be trans. I also really loved the details of Alex's experience, such as the feeling of waking up in the morning and realizing you went to sleep still wearing tucking underwear and finding guidance on reddit.
Part of the journey of self-discovery in the book is James', who is cis and straight (and whose best friend is gay and does drag, so it's not from a dearth of opportunity) but realizes immediately that he's very attracted to Alex in a dress (I did have "Andrew in Drag" running through my head for much of this book). The book is written first person from Alex's POV, so you don't see any of James' struggle except through Alex's observations, which I appreciated! It could have been a very different kind of romance and I'm glad that it wasn't.
A couple cons:
- Youths. Alex is 19 and James is 23, and i know i'm the cryptkeeper, but whew that is young (especially considering James is the CEO of an--admittedly tiny--company). I do think the book does well with their ages, but I was still relieved when Alex formed a bond with an older lesbian.
- the Epilogue. The plot all takes place over about a week, and the transformation in a weekend, so I appreciated that the author wanted to show what was going on a little while later. But tonally it felt very different from the rest of the book, a little like watching a sweet romantic movie and then discovering that part two was an entire season of a soap opera. There were a lot of parts of that which I could have done without--characters who weren't really present in the main part of the book were falling out of the woodwork.
The premise of Show Girl is that Alex is asked by James, his boss and maybe only friend, to crossdress and act as a booth babe for a tech convention that will make or break their little company. I went in thinking it would be gender fucky (which we love) but still essentially an m/m romance. I was wrong! Show Girl is much more about trans self-discovery and, well, transformation, than it is about romance (although the romance is there and it's very sweet).
Alex has always thought of himself as a cis straight man, and at the beginning of the book he struggles with comparing himself physically with his much more conventionally masculine boss, James. I enjoyed that Alex's journey was less "put on a dress and everything made sense" and more "put on a dress and now there's this onion of emotions to gradually unpeel." As an ace person who knew about asexuality and is not stupid but still needed someone to gently ask "have you considered that you might be asexual?" to put it all together I loved seeing a similar process unfold in Alex, who thinks that just because she wasn't born thinking that she was a girl that she must not be trans. I also really loved the details of Alex's experience, such as the feeling of waking up in the morning and realizing you went to sleep still wearing tucking underwear and finding guidance on reddit.
Part of the journey of self-discovery in the book is James', who is cis and straight (and whose best friend is gay and does drag, so it's not from a dearth of opportunity) but realizes immediately that he's very attracted to Alex in a dress (I did have "Andrew in Drag" running through my head for much of this book). The book is written first person from Alex's POV, so you don't see any of James' struggle except through Alex's observations, which I appreciated! It could have been a very different kind of romance and I'm glad that it wasn't.
A couple cons:
- Youths. Alex is 19 and James is 23, and i know i'm the cryptkeeper, but whew that is young (especially considering James is the CEO of an--admittedly tiny--company). I do think the book does well with their ages, but I was still relieved when Alex formed a bond with an older lesbian.
- the Epilogue. The plot all takes place over about a week, and the transformation in a weekend, so I appreciated that the author wanted to show what was going on a little while later. But tonally it felt very different from the rest of the book, a little like watching a sweet romantic movie and then discovering that part two was an entire season of a soap opera. There were a lot of parts of that which I could have done without--characters who weren't really present in the main part of the book were falling out of the woodwork.