Cameron Van Sant

I wish there was a space for a blog post or I could write descriptions on my new shelves. I'll just make a comment to remind myself what my new lists are.

Transgender: Self-explanatory. Any book prominently featuring a transgender person.

Queer YA: Any YA novel prominently featuring a queer character.

Needs More Queer: Any book that I feel does not quite live up to the promise of being a queer book in some way. Either if I wonder if the book was censored and unable to commit to its queer characters, or unnessarily punished the queer characters perhaps to appease someone, or if the author did not do adequate research to understand it's queer characters. Obviously, a very subjective list. In some cases, I feel the book did not live up to the brand of queerness that was advertised to me. (I.e. Both A+E and Beyond Binary contain no genderqueer representation, despite using those words on the front cover.)

The main point of this list is to remind me what books I may have given a good score because I felt it was a good book for what it was, but I was disappointed in the queer representation.

Gender Complexity Created By Prose: Any book that uses literary devices to create more gender complexity. Whether this is using sci-fi or fantasy tropes to play with gender (Shadow Man, Inheritance), or concealing characters' gender from the reader with neutral pronouns (The Cook and the Carpenter).