A Dream of a Woman

by Casey Plett

Casey Plett's 2018 novel Little Fish won a Lambda Literary Award, the Firecracker Award for Fiction, and the Amazon First Novel Award (Canada). Her latest work, A Dream of a Woman, is her first book of short stories since her seminal 2014 collection A Safe Girl to Love. Centering transgender women seeking stable, adult lives, A Dream of a Woman finds quiet truths in prairie high-rises and New York warehouses, and in freezing Canadian winters and drizzly Oregon days.

In "Hazel and Christopher," two childhood friends reconnect as adults after one of them has transitioned. In "Perfect Places," a woman grapples with undesirability as she navigates fetish play with a man. In "Couldn't Hear You Talk Anymore," the narrator reflects on past trauma and what might have been as she recalls tender moments with another trans woman.

An ethereal meditation on partnership, sex, addiction, romance, groundedness, and love, the stories in A Dream of a Woman buzz with quiet intensity and the intimate complexities of being human.

Genres: Short Stories, Queer, Fiction, LGBT, Transgender, Contemporary, Audiobook

Audiobook

First published September 21, 2021

About the author

Casey Plett is the author of On Community, A Dream of a Woman, Little Fish, and A Safe Girl to Love, the co-editor of Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science FIction and Fantasy From Transgender Writers, the Publisher at LittlePuss Press, and the winner of the Amazon First Novel Award, the Firecracker Award for Fiction, and the Lambda Literary Award for Best Transgender Fiction. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Ohio University.

Reviews

[CaseyTheCanadianLesbrarian · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been a big fan of Casey Plett's work since I first encountered it, so it's no surprise I loved her most recent short story collection. She writes about (and I suspect for) trans women, often looking at relationships between them. To get a glimpse of their intimacies, interiorities, and experiences is a privilege I don't take for granted as a cis woman!

Her characters are so intricate and authentic. From one woman with Mennonite roots returning to her home in the Canadian prairies to another leaving cozy Portland queertopia to transition in New York’s anonymity, the stories crackle with quiet complexity. They made me ache, laugh, cringe, cry.

The characters felt like friends who came for a visit and had to go home. I miss them.

Highly recommended, obviously!

[Danika at The Lesbrary · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m in awe of the way Plett paints these characters. They feel so real and multifaceted. They are deeply flawed, but sympathetically drawn. When a character makes a decision I disagree with, when they hurt someone, I felt for both of them. They all feel like they could walk off the page and into your life.

I highly recommend this collection for anyone who wants to feel bruise-tender about the world.

Full review at the Lesbrary.

[Alanna Why · Rating 5 out of 5]

Long review to come, but I think this is Plett's most mature and dare I say... best work to date?! These stories took my breath away. (Digital ARC provided by Arsenal Pulp Press for review purposes.)

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got to read this book in draft form and it's magnificent! Casey Plett's second collection finds her as tender and charming as ever, coaxing her characters to face the tough stuff -- addiction, betrayal, guilt, assault, disbelonging -- while finding their joy -- often in each other. (Steamy t4t love/sex scenes: check!) Plett's stories are stunning and moving and full of heart -- I'm excited for this book to greet the world.

[Skye Kilaen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of trans short stories is so amazing that I had to take breaks several times to let what I'd read so far sink in. Casey Plett is so unbelievably talented. Not an easy read, because the various characters go through *so* much, but I was blown away by this book. I can't wait to see what she publishes next.

[Emmkay · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had no idea I’d enjoy this collection of short stories about trans women’s lives so much. Beautifully written, each story felt complete (bearing in mind that one, “Obsolution,” continues throughout the book, each individual segment alternating with a standalone story). There’s gritty physicality and difficult experiences, of abuse, rejection, addiction, but it never felt like trauma porn. Rather, it felt like it hit the right mark between drawing on the author’s own experience and giving life to the individual characters and their stories. Besides being trans, I’m definitely guessing Plett is from a Mennonite background, for example, and she seems to know her way beautifully around the places the stories are set in, from Portland to Winnipeg to Windsor. But I didn’t find her writing fell into overly autobiographical sameyness. I’m looking forward to reading more of her work. 4.5.

Some parts that stand out for me -
- from “Obsolution,” the moment when the third person protagonist’s pronouns shift from he to she on a day when she’s caught in the rain, and her continued grappling with how much of an ongoing relationship and what kind to have with an ex-girlfriend who behaved towards her in unacceptable ways she has trouble naming
- from “Enough Trouble,” the main character sells sex to get enough money to cook a traditional Mennonite meal as a thank you before, she thinks, having to move on from a squeeze she hoped would be permanent, into an uncertain future
- the protagonists in both “Hazel and Christopher” and “Perfect Places” find that, while they are supportive of their intimate partner voicing and pursuing what they need, they can’t ultimately make themselves want the same thing.

[Fraser Simons · Rating 5 out of 5]

The thing I like about this the most is how organic everything feels. Interactions and relationships feel not only believable, but textured. Sparse prose. Accessible. Does not engage in pain olympics like so much fiction that gets published demands of non cis white het narratives. Encapsulates nuanced of Canadian life and culture, again, easily, dynamically, and casually.

It’s a deceptively complex, writing something that gels and appears seamless. To keep a reader going when it’s “just” a daily, lived experience that is nuanced and real in a messy way, non-after-school-special way. Heck, I’d wager it’s tough to keep someone reading where any character is just dealing with an hollywoodized problem. Where conflict isn’t charged in to pick up a pace. Or where the inciting incident isn’t the hook for the short story.

This is great story craft. And where other short stories suffer, with a lack of cohesiveness and an uneven collection for a reader, this chooses to plot a through line with a series of interconnected short stories between the ones that are a big incongruous. Very smart choice, structurally and I was surprised at how affecting the story became broken up that way as well. Essentially egg to fully realized identity, but the subtle ways, especially around a messy relationship across it, was really well handled and deftly conveyed some internalized issues with both parties.

Bit criminal this didn’t at least make the short list, imo. By far and away beats out a couple of them, in my mind. The only jagged edges I could spot, which is why this is a 4.5 rounded up, is with some dialogue—only in certain stories. Where it was a bit stilted and felt like it changed the voice of the character to have something specific come across. One other very short story I didn’t connect with the voice on. And that’s why that throughline was an absolutely fantastic idea. Very impressed. Perhaps the only 5 star short story collection I’ve read. I can’t remember another off hand, anyway.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. I'm not huge on literary fiction. It's something that my brain struggles with and I don't read a lot of it anymore. That being said I found that when I do read it I have to do it via audio. When I got approved for this from NetGalley, I was thrilled that it is narrated by the author and the audiobook was fantastic. She does a wonderful job of bringing all of her characters to life.

This is an anthology with a few stories in it all with trans women MCs. The first is about Hazel and Christopher who were childhood friends and reconnect and adulthood after Hazel's transition. This was my favorite of the stories and I think it comes down to how flawed everyone is. There is not a character in the story that is unblemished and every single one has some sort of negative trait that allows the reader to connect with them in their humanness. People are flawed and the story in particular kind of tricks you and then hits you with it at the end.

All the stories in this book feature flawed humans. There's no romanticizing of anything here. These are realistic and messy and dramatic and angsty stories. In the story with Vera and Iris there is content warnings for sexual assault and relationship abuse including gaslighting and manipulation. This is the longest story and was a bit difficult to follow at times. It spans multiple decades for Vera and while it was difficult to follow it was also realistically messy. She goes through a lot of life changes in relationships and experiences and moves towns and experiences life.

In what I'm pretty sure is the last one Gemma and Ava are two trans women who kind of navigate a relationship together. I'm not actually positive that the character's name is Gemma it could be Jenna. Because I listen to this as an audiobook I'm going based on what I heard and I have no spelling context for this. This was my least favorite and I'm not sure why necessarily it just didn't hit as hard for me. Hazel and Christopher story is pretty short and then Vera and Iris the story is really long and so Gemma and Ava's story falls somewhere in the middle and terms of length. It's still a good story and it tackles a lot of big issues specifically including alcoholism and addiction, but it wasn't my favorite of the anthology.

I definitely recommend this to people who enjoy literary fiction and to readers who enjoy the messier side of life and characters. This book is full of queer people. So many queer people. Each story has multiple trans women in it, Vera and iris's story has additional trans men and gay men and lesbians and I'm pretty sure that Ava and Gemma story has a bi or lesbian character.

If you are an audiobook listener or even if you're not, this would be a wonderful intro audiobook. The narration is fantastic and the stories are mostly followable without having text in front of you.

As a whole, I don't know that I will relisten to this necessarily but I did really enjoy it. The way that I'm doing ratings this year is a bit odd and so I'm not even sure where to put this. It's one that I recommend but probably won't reread.

CWs: drug addiction, alcohol addiction, alcohol use, explicit sex, sexual assault, rape, transphobia, homophobia, use of the f-slur, internalized transphobia, internalized homophobia, internalized lesbophobia, transphobic comments from a parent, loss of friendships, brief mention of ABDL and age play.

Takes place in a couple US states and in multiple areas of Canada.

[Sybil Lamb · Rating 5 out of 5]

bird hands !!

[gabby ☽ · Rating 5 out of 5]

such flawed characters but you can’t help but feel for them. i loved this

[Melinda Worfolk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Casey Plett is an amazing writer. I liked her previous book, Little Fish, but I thought this book was even better. I particularly loved “Obsolution,” which is like chapters of a novella interspersed between other unrelated short stories. I considered just reading all the instalments of “Obsolution” one after the other, but in the end decided not to, and I think I enjoyed that more, because I was always happy to return to the main characters after a little time away from them. It was like seeing old friends. There is pain in all these stories but also joy, and I found myself really rooting for the characters to live their best lives and find happiness.

Plett writes so beautifully about trans women’s experiences, and writes beautifully in general. I always get the feeling she loves her main characters and treats them tenderly as an author, no matter what their life circumstances throw at them. I will definitely read her next book.

Content warnings: Assault, sexual assault, alcohol addiction, violence and discrimination against trans and queer characters

[Tina · Rating 5 out of 5]

A DREAM OF A WOMAN by Casey Plett is an amazing short story collection! I loved this book! All of the stories revolve around transgender women and it was so easy to relate to them as women and humans. I loved the unique storytelling of “Obsolution” which is told in several parts throughout this book. It was my fave as we really get to know those characters but I really enjoyed all of the stories. There were several lines that made me go YES and I especially loved the stories set in Canada. I loved the main themes of finding yourself, finding connections and the beauty of everyday life written in the best possible way. Pick up this book!! I need to get my hands on Casey’s previous book Little Fish now! I loved her writing!
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And a big CONGRATS to Casey for A Dream of a Woman being chosen for the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist!
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Thank you to Arsenal Pulp Press for my advance reading copy!

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Plett is an unbelievably talented writer. Little Fish was already an incredible book, and somehow she has outdone herself with A Dream — I’m particularly impressed with the smooth interweaving of narratives to create a text that isn’t quite novel but isn’t quite story collection, either. There is something — a lot of somethings! — to be said about trans intertextuality. Plett’s attention to the subtle and unsubtle entangling of coming-of-gender stories (and the sometimes-claustrophobic closeness of material queer/trans communities) is so welcome, and, as always, her ability to write emotion so real I can physically sense it absolutely blows my mind. This is going to be one of my best books of 2022, for sure.

[Jo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I❤️CASEY PLETT

[Saivani · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars I love that these stories centred trans women and spoke about many topics like intimate partner violence, religion, finding community, etc.

[Caroline Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

Casey Plett gives us a collection of short stories centered around the lives of different trans women, but including a lot of common themes - addiction, found family, small town life, religious upbringings, etc. There are little slices of life, reflections on the past, and stories that span decades. I don’t read a ton of realistic fiction or short story collections, so this was something new for me. The author narrates the audiobook herself, which is always a great touch.

The biggest problem I had with the book was that the recurring elements woven through the different stories sometimes made it hard for me to distinguish them from each other, or get a feel for each different protagonist.

check the content warnings before reading!

[Ygraine · Rating 3 out of 5]

this collection nudged at some tender, bruisey places for me. my granddad, who i never called opa, who was born into a big mennonite farming family, who had memories i never heard first-hand, who spoke english for all his adult life but learnt german later as a way of remembering, who i wonder about often, now that i'm grown up and ready to understand, now that he's no longer here to tell me who he was before he was the granddad i knew. also a lot of university memories, blurry nights and panicked phone calls and so, so many conversations with people i loved abt why what had happened to them wasn't okay, the complicated networks of love and trust and betrayals of trust and dependence and un-safety. so like. i don't want to measure a book's value by how personally Relatable i found it, but i think there's a degree of softness i feel that comes from v specific points of contact and similarity, that tangles up my memories and relationships with my experience of reading ?

(maybe the softness also comes with listening to this as an audiobook, narrated by the author, bc there is something companionable & warm abt hearing her words in her voice.)

all of the above makes it sound as though i Loved this book, and i didn't, which feels unfair somehow but is the truth. i appreciate a lot of the emotional Meat of the stories, their conflicts & resolutions, their deeply real-feeling Feelings, but stylistically, they sort of blurred together for me? and maybe this comes down to personal preference, because i think it's much harder to have the sort of crisp, story by story clarity i like outside of fabulism and genre fiction - it makes sense that a collection of stories about relationships, friendships, trauma, addiction, transness and family have overlapping themes, use a relatively unchanging language and tone and register. i just struggled to find enough contrast to keep everything distinct, to feel that sharp, immediate, ambiguous hook of Something that lodges itself in my brain and stays there.

(thanks to netgalley for the advance audio copy!)

[Bryan Cebulski · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm IRATE at how good this is. Extremely strong collection. Replete with intimate, nuanced, subtle observations on relationships, and also references to Super Smash Bros. I love how the premise of every story is "What if some trans women hung out?" I'm a huge fan of low concept fiction and wish I saw more of it. Every story is just frank and open and avoids the obfuscation and irony that a lot of millennial fiction tends to be saturated with.

Obsolution was definitely my favorite. It formed the backbone of the collection, the way it interwove with each story up until Enough Trouble. A great record of the complicated feelings you can have toward an ex. It feels like such an ordinary thing to be compassionate toward or look back fondly on someone who has caused you a lot of damage, or to have that damage come back to haunt you even if said ex is trying to be better now. I appreciate how the story manages to be non-moralizing or framed as a survivor narrative. It's just like, sometimes people are fucked up toward you and they are probably not great people, yet they still continue to be in your life, and what do we do with that?

Enough Trouble was also very strong. I also really appreciated that it was just so long and tangential and girls just hanging out. Like that whole portion about the Mennonites. I feel like it breaks a lot of storytelling rules and still works.

[literaryelise]

I’m not going to give this a star rating because I honestly don’t think I can. Because on one hand I loved this- reading this I sometimes I felt like Plett had picked my brain in order to write it. I love how deeply trans all of Plett’s work is and has been (re: her previous novel Little Fish that I’ve also read). Plett is a trans woman who writes about trans women for trans women. I love that. However, I did find myself having to skip parts of this book because of how graphically triggering some of this book’s content was. There was no warning going into it and it honestly put me in a very bad place for a few hours. This book is not for everyone and as much as I enjoyed certain parts- because of some of the graphic triggers, I think I am one of the people this is not for.

cw: alcoholism, sexual content, transphobia, gay slurs, graphic depictions of sexual assault.

[Roz · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolutely powerful collection of stories about people trying to hack in not always great situations, but always treated with kindness and generosity by Plett, who has a voice that’s completely unique. She writes about real people, ones you can imagine running into at the food basics, and even in only a few pages she makes them come alive. It’s a magic trick, it’s estrodial realism. And when she stretches out, like on “Enough Trouble” she paints with broad strokes, capturing scenes of beauty and raw emotion. Nobody writes sex like her; nobody writes a blackout as well, either. Recommended.

[lauraღ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Without anchors, grief dissolves in the brain like salt in water, invisible and unremovable, silent and interwoven.

4.5 stars. A really beautiful collection of short stories centering trans women. Really excellent prose, alongside a bunch of funny, tender-hearted, messed-up, grieving, loving women. I liked all of these so so much. Particularly the format; there are a couple of stories that are told like vignettes, interspersed through the collection, and I really liked that way of experiencing their stories, especially in "Obsolution". Some really great character studies in here, as well as observations on abuse, addiction, casual cis violence. I remember thinking this about the other book I read by Plett: there's something about the way she writes and describes depression that's so aching and accurate.

Vera could never tell another breathing creature how replete her bones were, how full of undirected forgiveness.

Listened to the audiobook as read by the author, and it was really excellent. I always feel like I don't like when authors narrate their own fiction (it's fine when it's non-fiction, which typically requires less acting and voice work) but every so often an author comes along and proves me wrong. She was perfect for this, putting in nuance and emotion where another narrator might not have known to. This was a difficult read in many places but so enormously good. I have to remember to check out more from Plett.

Content warnings: transmisogny, slurs, sexual assault, intimate partner abuse, alcohol addiction

I whispered with my fingers on your skin, “Let no one hurt this woman again.”

[May Wang · Rating 4 out of 5]

These short stories caused me so much anxiety but in a good way… I would be worriedly hoping these women would be okay by the end of each chapter.

[jac · Rating 5 out of 5]

thank you to my great aunt for the recommendation, casey plett is a very good writer

[Luca Suede]

Sooo much better than I thought it was going to be! Most appreciated the character building work, everyone felt so fleshed out even in the briefer stories.

[Ash · Rating 5 out of 5]

Casey Plett is climbing up my favorite authors list. Little Fish was the first book in a long time that I felt compelled to just gift randomly to people, because it was so important to me to have other people read it. And I feel a sort of kinship with her, because although we've never crossed paths, we've lived in the same places at nearly the same times and she writes a version of Portland that I recognize. Her characters are people I've known.

If anything, I think that I liked this collection even more than Little Fish, and I'm not often a fan of short stories. Plett has a talent for pacing and for structure, so that every story here felt exactly as long as it needed to be. "Enough Trouble" was a standout for me, and "Obsolution", but there weren't any stories that I'd skip on a reread.

[August Thompson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful. Haunting. Casey Plett does a good job of putting things into words that I have trouble putting into words, and [I guess the name is a spoiler]'s story in "Obsolution" was so heartwrenching and gorgeous and like looking into a mirror. I don't actually have a lot of words for this one, I'll probably write up a better writeup later (I'm reviewing now because I completely forgot to take it off my "currently reading" when I originally finished, aah!) but just...god. Read this book.

[Jaymi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful and funny and sexy and cold and disturbing and charming and beautiful ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

“Gemma knows she has something special, a pass she cannot waste. Peace fills every pore of her at once, as if she'd stepped out the window to walk on the sky and a wind of stardust had swirled through her body and shot her higher, like she was nothing, nothing, nothing…

… She presses her nose to the window while Olive blinks in and out of sleep while Ava and Holly laugh at a workstation while a pocket universe unspools. Gemma had that only partway right. It begins as a universe as hopeful and possible as any other. It will quietly weave its own fence posts, it will discover its rhythm and order.”

[Solly · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't know much about this going in except that some reviewers I liked loved it, so from the cover I kinda expected this to be horror/SFF trans stories but they turned out to be contemporary stories about trans girls.

I loved this collection. Not every story hit as hard for me but the ones that hit were so damn excellent. My favourites were Obsolution, Hazel and Christopher, and Enough Trouble. I'm not always big on short story collections but this one really did it for me.

[❀ Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Dream of a Woman is a collection of short-stories by transgender author Casey Plett. The stories were gritty, descriptive and focused on the challenges faced by transgender women. They are linked and the characters seem so real.

I discovered this book as it is on my daughter’s reading list for her class on gender issues in literature. I look forward to hearing about her class discussions and love reading along so that we can chat about the books and learn together.

[lanner · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t think I’ll ever be the same after this. It tore apart what I thought I knew about my identity and left me with a wreckage to lovingly suture back together again. There was so much love in this book, despite the inevitable tragedies. To have fully realized, complex, flawed, trans characters written this well is such a privilege and so important nowadays. Happy pride and don’t drink while reading this lol!