The Transfeminine Review

At long last, I finally get to share my Opinions(tm)!

If you’re like me, then you probably love an end-of-year Top Ten list. There’s something so intrinsically satisfying about making lists and putting things into precise orders based on completely subjective criteria (neurodivergent mood) and if there’s anything I have a plethora of strong feelings about, it’s my favorite books :))

Last year, I read 89 books by transfeminine authors, 54 of which were novels. 27 of them, exactly half, were published during 2024. I didn’t want to bias the TFR Awards if I could help it, so I held off on making this list until after awards season was over. I also considered making a ranking of all 27 novels I read this year, but ultimately I wanted to keep this list as a celebration of the best books of 2024, particularly those which didn’t get recognition otherwise. The picks on this list represent my critical opinion having read not just 27 novels this year, but a selection of 172 novels by transfeminine authors spanning several decades. I will be giving a short review for every book on this list, as well as sharing my personal rating for each.

Across all 54 novels, this is what the broad distribution of my ratings looked like:

My average rating per novel was 6.5/10. My median rating was a 7/10, and my most common rating was a 6/10. It should be noted that my average rating in 2024 was substantially higher than my average rating in 2023, which I think can largely be attributed to the fact that most books I read this year were recommended to me, not scrounged off the depths of the internet. My lowest rated book this year was Horned Winged Blessed by E.L. Croucher (2019) with a 1/10, and my highest rated book this year was School by Isabel Paban Freed (2023) with a rare 10/10. Neither book came out this year, and thus neither will be appearing on this list.

A brief note on how I rate books – translated into a 5-star scale, it’s useful to think of it this way: a 7/10 on my rating scale is the equivalent of a 5-star rating on Amazon or Goodreads. One can thus translate the scale as something like this:

I will be adding stars next to my eight and nine-star ratings to show this distinction. I’ve only ever rated four books a 10/10 (three fiction, one nonfiction), and the highest rating on this list will be a 9/10.

I will only be including books that I read in 2024. I read Welcome to Dorley Hall in 2023, and thus it is not eligible for this list. For those curious, if I had included it, it would rank as #3.

Honorable mentions: These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart by Izzy Wasserstein; The Sunforge by Sascha Stronach; Performance Review by Aster Olsen

1. The Top Ten
   1. #10 – Unmarked Grave, Carietta Dorsch
   2. #9 – Hard Times at the Aprostate Crater by Persephone Erin Hudson
   3. #8 – ⭐ The Library Thief by Kuchenga Shenjé
   4. #7 – ⭐ Girlmode by Magdalene Visaggio, ill. Paulina Ganucheau
   5. #6 – ⭐ Dulhaniyaa – Talia Bhatt
   6. #5 – ⭐ All the Heart You Eat by Hailey Piper
   7. #4 – ⭐ Love/Aggression by June Martin
   8. #3 – ⭐ Sundown in San Ojuela by M.M. Olivas
   9. #2 – ⭐⭐ Bad Habit by Alana S. Portero, trans. Mara Faye Lethem
   10. #1 – ⭐⭐ Kimmy by Alyson Greaves

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The Top Ten

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Click… click… click…
Vera is an up-and-coming author. She rents a cabin for the summer to work on her next story. As she clicks away on her keyboard, she soon finds out that the past cannot be deleted. Sometimes, our yesterdays are strong enough to rewrite themselves into our present.
Click… click… click…
What happens when the sun rises and the cockroaches scatter? Are our secrets buried until darkness comes? What if we become the shadow and darkness takes over?
Click… click… click…
As Vera types a new story, her secrets click like cockroaches scurrying from an unmarked grave.

This is a quirky little book, and I’ve been on a whole emotional journey with it. When I first read it, I was absolutely blown away by Dorsch’s command of the narrative and her ability to weave reality, mental illness, and the looming creep of a physical terror through each other. This is a book that has no interest in showing its cards, and I respect that immensely. The further I got from reading it, though, the more apparent some of the technical issues with the prose became. Ultimately, I’ve come to a middle ground between my opinion of the middling prose and the incredible experience, and the placement on this list reflects it.

Dorsch has written the best depiction of fiction as a tool of dissociation and self-harm that I’ve ever read. The MC’s mental heath issues are not extricable from her art – there is no differentiation as to where she ends and her characters begin, and it allows Dorsch to produce a searing dissection of her collapsing psyche: the madness, the monomania, the slow crumble of self-care. This book was horrifying not because of the cockroaches or the creepy houses in the woods, but because I saw myself as a writer in it; it mirrors our ugliest creative thoughts, gives them teeth and claws. While the prose quality reflects that this book is self-published, the story underneath of the American gothic tradition à la Hawthorne or Poe. And when the title drops near the beginning of the book, it’s nothing short of chilling.

My Rating: 7/10

Featured Articles: 12 Spooky Books by Transfemmes to Read This Halloween

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The dolphin-pussy of the firmament contracts. Lakes of bubblegum-cum boil in a vast crater at the end of history. Hyena-Man, feral and insane, spends his undying days locked in an endless cycle of Wile E. Coyote cum-denial with the only other living being on earth: The Ωstrich. At the neverending end of the fucking world, what is there to do but beat off the blues and kill that stupid fucking bird once and for all? That is, until repressed horrors bubble up from the tarpits of the old world and new horrors encroach from beyond the stars, threatening to finally break Hyena-Man beyond all hope.

HARD TIMES AT THE APROSTATE CRATER is a serialized weird-horror hybrid-novel, roadkill tap-dancing at the intersection of Grant Morrison’s comics, Disco Elysium, Looney Toons, transsexual extremity fiction, and 80s pop diva music.  An erotic-psychotic episode for the end times, grasping for hope while circling the drain of collapse.

This is the most over-stimulated I have ever been while reading a book. It’s either Looney Toons A/B/O fanfiction or a brilliant dissolution of post-post-modernist fiction into incomprehensible and utterly hostile walls of pure syntax, and the fact that I still can’t decide which after literal months of thinking about it is 100% the reason it made this list. I saw a thread of somebody trying to do literary analysis on this thing the other day, and all I can say is hats off, kudos to you. For me, this was a book to be experienced, not understood.

My Rating: 7/10

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The library is under lock and key. But its secrets can’t be contained.

1896. After he brought her home from Jamaica as a baby, Florence’s father had her hair hot-combed to make her look like the other girls. But as a young woman, Florence is not so easy to tame—and when she brings scandal to his door, the bookbinder throws her onto the streets of Manchester.

Intercepting her father’s latest commission, Florence talks her way into the forbidding Rose Hall to restore its rare books. Lord Francis Belfield’s library is old and full of secrets—but none so intriguing as the whispers about his late wife…

Evocative, arresting and tightly plotted, The Library Thief is at once a propulsive Gothic mystery and a striking exploration of race, gender and self-discovery in Victorian England.

This is the third time I’ve discussed this book on this blog, so definitely check out my other thoughts about this book in the link below. Some things I haven’t talked about yet: the character work in this book is excellent! Kuchenga does a phenomenal job at realizing the inner lives of her protagonists, her villains, her supporting characters. Everyone feels like a living breathing person, and it lends her plot a vitality that brings history into the contemporary. Victorian England feels lived-in, not like set dressing, and the atmosphere here is immaculate.

Also, if this book hadn’t won the Outstanding Historical Fiction award, I would have thrown an actual riot. This one absolutely blew me away in a genre that I have very little affinity for. Much love to historical aficionados, but I’ve always found the genre a little stuffy – that was not a experience I had with this book, and I couldn’t be happier about it.

My Rating: 8/10

Featured Articles: 15 Black Transfeminine Novelists You Should Read, The Longlist for Best Transfeminine Fiction of 2024 TFR Reader’s Choice Award, The 2024 TFR Reader’s Choice Awards

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The last thing Phoebe Zito wants is to be noticed. The newest kid at Sally Ride High School, newly arrived in Los Angeles, and newly transitioned, she’s just trying to blend in while she figures out exactly who she is. But with her mom checked out, her dad still adjusting to having a daughter, and no guidebook on how to be a girl, that isn’t going to be easy.

Enter Mackenzie Ishikawa. She’s the girl who all girls want to be, and all the boys want to be with—and, Mackenzie has decided, Phoebe’s new best friend. Mackenzie knows what it takes to survive and thrive as a girl in high school, most of all that no matter who Phoebe wants to be, or who she wants to date, she’s going to need someone having her back.

Phoebe soon realizes what Mackenzie knows too well: Being true to yourself is going to mean breaking some hearts. But as Phoebe discovers what kind of girl she is—and what kind of girl everyone around her thinks she’s supposed to be—she worries one of those hearts will be her own.

First things first – this book is absolutely gorgeous. Phoebe is lovingly drawn from cover to cover in all her messiness – she is real and present, and that has an unbelievable amount of power for a trans teenager searching for herself in fiction. Whether she’s boymoding in her dysphoria hoodie, drunk in high femme mode at a shitty high school party, or shredding the gnar, Visaggio and Ganucheau never shy away from showing it, and that’s exactly what we need more of in trans YA fiction.

I was fifteen when I came out to my parents, and though I searched for good trans YA, I didn’t find any characters who truly spoke to my personal experience. Danny from April Daniels’ Dreadnought had the ‘Just Add Water’ magic going on, Amanda from Meredith Russo’s If I Was Your Girl had already fully transitioned, Robin from Zoe Brown’s Becoming Robin was younger than me, Karin Bishop’s writing was angled to an older generation. So trust me: if I’d had this book back then, it would have blown my socks off. If you’re a trans teenager, if you’ve got a trans daughter, this is required reading.

My Rating: 8/10

Featured Articles: The 2024 TFR Reader’s Choice Awards

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Esha Arora is the last person anyone would have expected to acquiesce to an arranged marriage. Outspoken, opinionated and forward-thinking, she has made her thoughts on these archaic institutions known to anyone who’d lend her an ear. To her traditional family’s surprise and joy, however, when a good rishta for her hand comes along, Esha agrees to abruptly quit her MFA program in the States and returns to India to be wed. Her mother wastes neither time nor expense in preparing for the most bombastic wedding money can afford—she has more than a few friends to outdo and impress, after all!

In the pursuit of extravagance, Esha’s mother arranges a dance instructor for her, to train her to perform a Bollywood-style, choreographed dance routine at the wedding, as is en vogue. Despite Esha’s lack of enthusiasm, her mother will not be swayed. Knowing that the wedding isn’t actually about her wishes, Esha reluctantly agrees, deciding that if she’s going to put on a show for her relatives, she might as well put on a good one.

That’s when Billu, a cyclone in a salwar and dance instructor extraordinaire, bursts into the dull monotony of Esha’s pre-wedding existence. To her shock and delight, Esha finds herself enjoying her lessons with Billu, in addition to every other moment with her that she finds herself trying to steal away. Slowly, it begins to dawn on Esha that she isn’t nearly as resigned to her marital fate as she once thought—but can she un-make a commitment to her family so easily? Will she be able to confess her feelings to Billu before the latter exits her life, or will she be consigned to her role of dulhaniyaa?

A Bollywood-inspired desi lesbian romance, ‘Dulhaniyaa’ is a story of class, queerness, and the struggle to accept your identity even when it seems to be in conflict with your family and culture.

Talia Bhatt is one of the leading voices in the field of transfeminism right now, so it really shouldn’t come as a surprise that the feminist criticism in this book is razor sharp. Talia takes on arranged marriages, class dynamics, and womanhood in modern India with flair and panache, and it’s a real pleasure to read.

My reason for ranking this book this highly, however, comes down almost exclusively to one aspect, and that’s the gorgeous use of setting and atmospheric detail. Mumbai is so vividly painted, as is the romance between Esha and Billu – the prose is raw and crackling in that way that only excellent self-published work can pull off, and even though I know next-to-nothing about Bollywood and Mumbai, and didn’t understand a word of the Hindi frequently peppered throughout the text, I was deeply immersed in the story and the moment. There’s one moment toward the end of the book where the characters are driving across the rainswept city, and I swear I could smell the petrichor. You can’t teach that kind of detail writing, and for a debut novella, well – the rest will come with time.

My Rating: 8/10

Featured Articles: The 2024 TFR Reader’s Choice Awards

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What really happened to Cabrina Brite?

Ivory’s life changes irrevocably when she discovers the body of Cabrina Brite on the sands of Cape Morning, along with a mysterious poem. How did she die, and why does it seem she was trying to swim to Ghost Cat Island, the center of so many local mysteries?

Desperate to uncover the answers surrounding Cabrina’s death, and haunted by her discovery, Ivory begins to see the pale ghost of Cabrina, only to shake it off as a mere hallucination. But Ivory is not alone. Cabrina’s closest friends have also seen a similar apparition, and as they toy with occult possibilities, they begin to unravel the truth behind Cabrina’s death.

Because Cape Morning isn’t a ghost town, but a town filled with ghosts, and Ivory is about to discover just what happens when you let one in.

Okay, to understand why this novel had such an impact on me, I’m gonna need to tell you a story.

My mother passed away in 2022. Her cancer was absolutely horrible, and the timing was worse – a brain surgery gone wrong during the literal first week of COVID had left her mostly paralyzed and unable to properly read or speak (she was a book-lover, reading was all she did in her free time). She fought the illness for two and a half years on a six-month prognosis, but being forced to watch her slowly wither was a horror novel in its own right. It was formative, and harrowing, and so indescribably traumatic that no article can do justice to how bad it was.

Mom loved the beach, so Dad wanted to get her there one last time. Inexplicably, however, we decided to go to Rehoboth in the middle of October, peak Atlantic Storm season. And the beach was, well, dark.

It stormed. A lot. The sand was soaked solid, and the wind was strong enough to leave my hair in knots. Summer season was over, so most of the shops were boarded up, and we ate some real strange meals anywhere we could find handicap parking. The boardwalk was deserted.

Mom couldn’t go to the water – it was too gross outside to try anything with the wheelchair, and she was sad, which meant that everybody was. So I went out alone. In the middle of the night, when it was dark and unseasonably warm and you would have been able to see the stars, maybe, if the sky hadn’t been laden with clouds. We were up in one of the oceanside highrises that destroys the natural sand dunes, and you could see the encroachment of tidal erosion. The shoreline was entire yards shorter than it had been just five years ago. So I went out – alone, barefoot, and unbearably bereft.

I had a complete mental breakdown less than a week later and would be in crisis for the next six weeks.

October 2021 was not a good month.

There’s a lot to be said about All The Hearts You Eat. I could shower praise on Hailey’s prose, the atmosphere, the technical craft. All of that should be lauded.

But at the end of the day, I loved this book because it vividly spoke to a deeply traumatic moment in my life, and seemed to immortalize it, like lightning in a bottle, so I wouldn’t have to carry it alone anymore. I was Ivory that October. I wanted to walk into the ocean, I wanted to drink blood, I wanted the world to burn. Almost three years to the date after that horrible trip to Rehoboth, here it was again, captured in crystal, and I felt lighter for reading it.

What more can you ask from a horror novel?

My Rating: 8/10

Featured Articles: 12 Spooky Books by Transfemmes to Read This Halloween

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Best friends Lily and Zoe fight, separate, reunite, and repeat, each time deepening the belief that the other is the source of their problems. Once Lily, a struggling tattoo apprentice, is exiled from their shared house, she bounces from an artist’s fixer-upper, to a cult leader with a harem of subs, to a house shared with the goddess of transfemininity. Meanwhile, rising movie star Zoe becomes more cutthroat by the day in her relentless quest for fame. If Lily can’t give up her desire for control, if Zoe can’t lay aside her cruelty and ego, they’ll never escape their intolerable places in the world. Traversing art, domination, sex, and shape-shifting houses, Love/Aggression is a novel about the indignity of depending on other people, and the terrible cost of trying not to.

There’s literary fiction, and then there’s Literary Fiction, and this is fiction at its literariest. In any year that didn’t have Dorley on the ballot, this book would have been an easy shoe-in for the Outstanding Contemporary Fiction award at the TFR Awards. By my token (which also generally holds Dorley more as genre fiction), this is the best contemporary novel of the year. This book is riotously funny, darkly satirical, and completely unafraid to display its characters at their most noxious. Absurdist fiction is a lost art (outcompeted by reality and whatnot) and June can almost make you believe that it’s possible again. I know the trans girls in this book and their struggling little communities, and you probably will too.

Oh – and the ending comes to stab you like a knife to the gut.

Rating: 8/10

Featured Articles: The Longlist for Best Transfeminine Fiction of 2024 TFR Reader’s Choice Award, The 2024 TFR Reader’s Choice Awards

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When the death of her aunt brings Liz Remolina back to San Ojuela, the prospect fills her with dread. The isolated desert town was the site of a harrowing childhood accident that left her clairvoyant, the companion of wraiths and ghosts. Yet it may also hold the secret to making peace with a dark family history and a complicated personal and cultural identity.

Setting out on the train with her younger sister Mary in tow, she soon finds herself hemmed in by a desolate landscape where monsters and ancient gods stalk the night. She’s relieved at first to find that her childhood best friend Julian still lives in San Ojuela, but soon realizes that he too is changed. Haunted.

Yet she’ll have no other choice than to seek out his help as the darkness closes in.

I really, really wanted to give this book a 9/10.

It’s a phenomenal debut – let’s get that out of the way first. The foray into Mezoamerican mythology is absolutely brilliant, the sundown town is as effective a villain as ever, I loved the understated queer characters and how their identities flowed and ruptured across the page. I tend to be rather sour on the MFA style, but this is a great example of how MFA technical training can elevate prose without gentrifying it. The craft here is excellent.

Oh, and then the ending.

How do you talk about a book’s ending without spoiling it?

This is a book with teeth, a book that’s not afraid to get its characters bloody. It’s a book that unapologetically deployed the first, second, and third person perspectives to really interesting effect. It breaks rules in interesting ways and makes it serve its prose. It’s fresh, and innovative, and it came so freaking close to having a jaw-dropping ending that demands reflection.

And then it pulls a Percy Jackson.

Don’t get me wrong – you should read this book. It’s my favorite of the 8/10 group from this year. But man, it could have so easily bumped my #2 pick on this list if it had just full sent and committed to the vicious ending it came so close to having. It didn’t need the Deus Ex.

I understand why Olivas chose to end the book the way she did.

But man, is this a bittersweet placement.

Rating: 8/10

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Anchored by the voice of its sweet and defiant narrator, Bad Habit casts a trans woman’s trying youth as a heartfelt odyssey. Raised in an animated yet impoverished blue-collar neighborhood, Alana S. Portero’s protagonist struggles to find her place. As the city around her changes–the heroin epidemic that ravages Madrid through the ’80s and ’90s, rallying calls of worker solidarity and the pulsing beat of the city’s night scene– she becomes increasingly detached from the world and, most crucially, herself.

Yet through her eyes, the streets and people of Madrid are illuminated by a poetry absent from everyday life. And by this guiding light she begins to plot her own course, from Margarita, the local trans woman whose unspoken kinship both captivates and frightens her, to Jay, her first love and source of an inevitable heartbreak, to the irrepressible diva Caramel. As she forges ahead, she sets her compass to a personal north star: endeavoring to find herself. But with each step forward, she is confronted by a violence she doesn’t yet know how to counter; in this exciting, often terrifying, world each choice is truly a matter of life and death.   

With her first novel, Alana S. Portero strikingly underscores the ties between gender and class, the search for identity, and the power of sisterhood and community. Gentle but blistering, Bad Habit is a mesmerizing story of self-realization that speaks to the outsider in all of us.  

This has been a fantastic year for cover art, so I’ll avoid superlatives, but the cover for the translation of Portero’s 2023 novel La mala costumbre truly evokes the precise feeling of reading this book – a mesmerizing and at-times disorienting memory walk through the memories of a closeted trans woman, told in aching, wonderful detail.

Bad Habit serves Proust from its first page to its last – its prose, its structure, all reminiscient of a transfeminine Swann’s Way for the 21st Century. This is details-oriented modernist fiction down to the core, and that Portero’s literary style comes through translation this vividly is a ridiculous credit to both her and Lethem. The book wastes neither a page nor a word. On every level of production – writing, editing, translation, printing – the technical work that went into the physical product is exceptional.

I can’t stop thinking about this book as a commentary on trans aging, though. So few books take on the underrepresented topic of trans elders and trans elder care, and fewer still manage to do so compassionately. But the best way I can describe Portero’s handling of the topic is tender. This book is so gentle with its characters, even when they’re making self-destructive decisions or trapped in their own banality. It’s beautifully well-done – and the ending, the ending is nothing short of perfect.

My Rating: 9/10

Featured Articles: The 2024 TFR Reader’s Choice Awards

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John and Emily are a perfectly normal couple living in near-future suburban America, with plans to attend a perfectly normal Halloween party with Emily dressed in a perfectly normal android costume. But Emily has an accident, so John steps up to take her place, and that’s where things start to go wrong. Because the hollowed-out android they bought from John’s brother is supposed to be dead, and isn’t supposed to be influencing his actions, and when the time comes to take it off, it’s supposed to let him out…

A novel of transformation, alienation, and isolation.

This is the best work of TG/TF fiction ever written.

That’s not an exaggeration or a prevarication. Secrets of Dorley Hall may be a slightly better book, but in terms of taking an old and often-neglected genre and making it great, I don’t think that any TG/TF story has ever done it better than Kimmy.

If you didn’t grow up like me in the TG/TF gutters, if you’re not as much of a trash gremlin as Alyson and I are, then the most apt genre description for this book is extreme horror and you should read that trigger warning with extra care. If, however, you know your way around Fictionmania or TGStorytime like the back of your hand, then buckle the fuck up, cause this is the good shit.

This is a classic sci-fi bent dollification yarn, and it starts out largely as you might expect from a story in the genre – man finds a contrived excuse to get into a robot costume, and the costume isn’t so fast to let him out. The science and mechanics of the Kimmy dolls is more well-worn trope than anything; it doesn’t matter how the man becomes a sex doll, exactly, it matters what happens once she’s inside.

And boy, does Kay have a whole lot going on inside.

The psychological horror of this book, its slow deconstruction of Kay’s mind and humanity and personhood, is every Alyson Greaves strength played to perfection. Structurally, the book captures the mundanity of the domestic routine. Kay’s life is repetitive, monotonous, and inescapable – she does not emerge from it on her own volition, it merely (literally) disassembles her. The slow, blurry descent into sexual and domestic slavery is not sugarcoated or romanticized: there is no titillating sexual euphoria in the loss of personhood and control found in most TG/TF stories, this is played 100% seriously and viciously, and in its absolute commitment to the realist lens achieves a standard for TG/TF-as-commentary that I don’t think any story has ever attained, not even Dorley.

Greaves paints a nauseating portrait of transmisogynistic violence – the bloody and oft-sexual violence of the hostile birth family, the apathetic and resentful violence of the unaccepting spouse, the societal violence of a world that views transfeminized bodies as sex toys, the internalized violence of a newfound trans woman’s slow surrender to the cruelties of her own mind. TG/TF as a genre sits in a strange intersection between erotica, psychological and body horror, and suspense – what I find truly unique about this book is how, in drawing upon all three genre, Kimmy does not truly fall into any of them. It exists on the sole terms of its uniquely transfeminine genre.

Moreover, Kimmy builds on Greaves’ themes of sisterhood in a really compelling way by exploring the transhumanist viewpoints of the Kimmies and how they are (and aren’t) humanesque. As a plural person, Alyson does a brilliant job at depicting headspace and mind palaces, and the romance between Kay and Kim is aching and so, so good.

Oh, and the ending?

Wow.

I fucking loved this book. It’s my favorite book on this list by a pretty gaping margin. For a full day after I finished it, I didn’t have any thoughts at all – my brain was simply quiet. Do you know how much it takes to leave my brain in stunned silence?

I seriously debated giving this a 10/10, but it’s a little bloated and has some other technical and structural issues here and there, and honestly I still believe that Alyson has room to grow as an author. If I only rated books based on my personal enjoyment, this would probably have made its way to the top of my list, or near it at the least. A stunning achievement in a genre only beginning to find its feet.

My Rating: 9/10

Featured Articles: 12 Spooky Books by Transfemmes to Read This Halloween, The Longlist for Best Transfeminine Fiction of 2024 TFR Reader’s Choice Award, The Shortlist for Best Transfeminine Fiction of 2024 TFR Reader’s Choice Award, The 2024 TFR Reader’s Choice Awards

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And that’s my list! What was your favorite transfeminine novel of 2024? Let me know down in the comments, and I’ll see you guys next week ❤

Bethany Karsten