Ella’s Reviews > Sister Europe > Status Update

so i sort of assumed the writer was trans because it seemed like they were taking a lot of liberties with one of the main characters nicole who is trans. i felt a little uncomfortable while reading (which is not always a bad reading experience, sometimes i think it is good for u) but when i found out the writer was cis, i think i identified my discomfort with the writing of Nicole and the people around her was because it felt lazy. i felt like the author was not trying to portray a complex trans person but was just using her being trans as something to make the story interesting or racy, almost using it as a trope, which felt disingenuous. which i think can be seen through how much airtime (pagetime?) the author gives the other character’s perception of Nicole-there is a lot of description about how they perceive her and what they think about her being trans, basically nothing else about her. she is also a minor!! so it feels super weird for all these adults to be internally commenting on their perceptions of her, there were a bunch of lines i found super weird and upsetting. i was trying to figure out if the author had some deeper message about like how the weight of these perceptions is affecting nicole & maybe about what it could feel like to always being surveilled or evaluated on your gender performance, but it really doesn’t do this in a complex way. it just more seems like in the book nicole’s personhood and her transness has to be validated and commented on by adult’s perceptions of her.

unrelated but i also found the references often kind of pretentious—maybe this is because of my age and because i don’t always get the references. i felt the same way about sigrid nunez’s the friend, where it feels like the author is dropping in random quotes for no reason to show how smart and well-read they are and only if you are smart and well-read will you be in on the joke. a direct opposite would be the idiot, where the references don’t make you feel stupid and sometimes the main character is as perplexed as you are. (but this supports my theory about age, as the main character in the idiot is close to my age).

oh also. i found an interview with the author where someone asks if she did research for a novel she wrote with a Black main character and she says, “I drew exclusively on personal observations.” and “So I did no research at all.” mmhmm. and this book is giving the same energy.

haven’t decided if i want to finish it yet and see what the end is like. might kind of be out of spite at this point tho.