By a prize-winning, young Black trans writer of outsized talent, a fierce and disciplined memoir about queerness, masculinity, and race.
Even as it shines light on the beauty and toxicity of Black masculinity from a transgender perspective—the tropes, the presumptions—Pretty is as much a powerful and tender love letter as it is a call for change.
“I should be able to define myself, but I am not. Not by any governmental or cultural body,” Brookins writes. “Every day, I negotiate the space between who I am, how I’m perceived, and what I need to unlearn. People have assumed things about me, and I can’t change that. Every day, I am assumed to be a Black American man, though my ID says ‘female,’ and my heart says neither of the sort. What does it mean—to be a girl-turned-man when you’re something else entirely?”
Informed by KB Brookins’s personal experiences growing up in Texas, those of other Black transgender masculine people, Black queer studies, and cultural criticism, Pretty is concerned with the marginalization suffered by a unique American constituency—whose condition is a world apart from that of cisgender, non-Black, and non-masculine people. Here is a memoir (a bildungsroman of sorts) about coming to terms with instantly and always being perceived as “other”
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This book, above all, offers a potent narrative of learning to live authentically, no matter the circumstances and challenges. Brookins relays their experiences and opinions with candor. . . . The most compelling threads of the text relate the author’s journey of self-actualization, from questioning ideas of gender to shedding shame. 'My life’s work is to make Black people, queer people, and masculine people fall in love with who they are and shed the daily violence of betraying themselves and others,' they write. This book is a powerful testament to that. An inspiring and deeply human work.
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Kirkus Reviews