Review by Booklist Review
Horn's sometimes profound, sometimes baffling autobiographical essays have in common a near obsession with water, aquatic life, and aquariums (hence the title). Arranged in roughly chronological order, the essays begin with Horn's childhood living with an eccentric artist mother who delights in photographing her child encased in full-body casts or floating, as if lifeless, in a tub surrounded by dead squids. The mother once turns herself into living art, too, with Horn finding her in a gallery lying naked in a vitrine of offal and maggots (truly!). Somehow, Horn survives all of this but nearly dies when an accident involving weight lifting results in the loss of the ability to speak, read, and write. Along the way, readers learn that Horn is openly queer and transmasculine, a fact that informs a number of the essays. Though the author's experiences are uniformly interesting and the essays about them well written, the book's more bizarre elements may be off-putting for some readers. But those who enjoy the offbeat will be right at home.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The complexities of a trans identity and contemplations of aquatic life provide the pulsating current to these ruminative essays. Horn, a British translator who was born female and identifies as "nonbinary, transmasculine," revisits episodes of discontent and danger: a 1990s childhood marked by a loathing of girls' clothing and toys; a confrontation with hostile Russian women in a swimming pool changing room; a terrifying attack in their adulthood by a stranger on the street; and a season of youthful malaise working as a kitchen hand in Belgium while battling podiatric warts that were miraculously cured by a folk healer. All this swirls around the question, "What might gender look like written beyond the blurring of a male-female binary?"--an inquiry that begets picaresque scientific and historical disquisitions on pike, sturgeon, and eels that change sex when they mature. "Noting these aquatic bodies" as a child, Horn writes, "helped dissolve a world I found too hard." Gleaning resonant insights from the fishes' mysteriously mutable existences, Horn offers fascinating piscine lore, rendered in prose that's grounded and evocative even when hallucinatory (weathering a tropical storm, "I watched fish glide between car tyres, suck at weed caught in hubcaps, their bodies illuminated by the beam of car park floodlights"). The result is a sonorous meditation on living a fluid life. (June)
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Review by Library Journal Review
In Also a Poet, New York Times best-selling author Calhoun blends literary history and memoir, examining her relationship with her father, art critic and poet Peter Schjeldahl, and their shared passion for Frank O'Hara's work as she draws on taped interviews he conducted for a never-completed biography of O'Hara. In Somewhere We Are Human, distinguished writers/activists Grande and Guiñansaca compile 44 essays, poems, and artworks by migrants, refugees, and Dreamers that help clarify the lives of those who are undocumented. Featuring a selection of letters exchanged by Ernest Hemingway and his son Patrick over two decades, Dear Papa was edited by Patrick Hemingway's nephew Brendan Hemingway and his grandson Stephen Adams (40,000-copy first printing). Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, Horn's Voice of the Fish uses fish, water, and mythic imagery to illuminate the trans experience, with travels through Russia and a devastating injury the author suffered as backdrop. Former deputy editor of The New Yorker and former editor of the New York Times Book Review, McGrath looks back on childhood summers as both joyous memory and obvious idealization in The Summer Friend, also considering a close friendship with someone from a very different background. Starting out with his nearly dying on the day he was born, the world's best-selling novelist has some amazing stories to tell in James Patterson by James Patterson (250,000-copy first printing). Having probed the lives of Mary Shelley and Annabella Milbanke and Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron's wife and daughter, acclaimed biographer Seymour takes on Jean Rhys, the celebrated author of Wide Sargasso Sea in I Used to Live Here Once.
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Shaped like a discursive, commonplace book, this is memoir as creative process. "How does one write of a self that is fundamentally displaced? Of a self that, for decades, has seen and not recognised its own body?" In Horn's first book, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, they seek to answer this question, weaving together erudite and personal essays to create a shimmering, watery mosaic of trans autobiography richly infused with literature, science, history, and myth: "I have always enjoyed a more haphazard, more crustacean zigzag through the past," writes Horn. In the first piece, "In Water Disjointed From Me," the author grapples with the pronoun I and their sense of gender in physical and linguistic terms: "Nonbinary, transmasculine--my gender exists, for the most part, as unseen, unworried, unintelligible." Horn's "mother gave me her strange love of aquariums," and the author "wished to not be human, to slip from this world, turn saline." When they were a child, she took performance piece photos of young Lars in a bathtub filled with dead squid, next to a shark, or, starting at 4, in painful full-body plaster casts, "curated, articulated and placed." While living in Russia, "one of the world's most homophobic countries, my sexuality, always snarling to the side of me, finally caught up. Bit into this body until it showed itself raw, bloodied." Writing about a huge aquarium in Atlanta, Horn writes about how, regarding the concept of a gender spectrum, "I just feel like a soul in a strange craft." They also recount in searing detail being attacked and nearly raped as well as an "aborted suicide." A severe injury to Horn's back oddly resulted in the inability to speak, read, or write, so "I tattooed my body with text." In "some strange, gilled sense," the author writes ruefully, "my body finally breathed." Though the narrative sometimes wanders, Horn's story sparkles with emotional intensity. A promising literary debut. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
