by Victoria James Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer: A Memoir offers readers a look into self-discovery and what it means to grow up without the language to describe gender. The memoir unfolds through moments of friction and curiosity. It probes the kinds of questions that surface long before anyone is introduced to terms like nonbinary or genderqueer. “Why are girls supposed to shave their legs but boys don’t have to?” (p. 42). Questions like this appear throughout the memoir, capturing the subtle but persistent ways that gendered expectations shape a child’s understanding of what is “normal.” Kobabe describes these pressures as… Read More
Occulted
awaiting review
The Magic Fish
Book Review by Scott Nass, MD Named for a character central to one of the fairy tales told as stories within the main narrative, The Magic Fish by Vietnamese-American cartoonist Trung Le Nguyen is a semi-autobiographical work that adeptly weaves these fairy tales around the story of young Tiến and his mother Hiến (Helen). Nguyen’s use of two distinct color palettes to differentiate the real from the fantastical enables the reader to follow the parallel arcs easily as Tiến and Helen take turns reading the stories aloud during their evenings together. We experience a slice of Helen’s life as… Read More