Girlfriends

Zhou's vibrant debut collection chronicles the often-messy lives of her young trans women protagonists. In "Performance," a 21-year-old student writes her thesis on Henry James and brushes up on "skills of compartmentalization" to deal with her work as an escort. Marina, the adventure-seeking poet in "Affection," drops out of grad school and develops an attraction to a photographer after a nude photo shoot. Other stories propel the reader directly into fraught situations: a father and daughter struggle to make a connection in "Do-Over"; Leonora, the college dropout in "Means to an End," tries to restructure her new life in a crowded apartment filled with bickering lesbians. These character studies are light on plot, but the women spring to life through dialogue, body postures, and personal style, whether it's facial piercings, flannel, or hoop earrings. Zhou's animated depictions of youthful angst and queer desire have much to offer. (Oct.)

Tender, incisive portraits of trans womanhood, the ties that bind women to one another, and the complex relationships of youth. Simultaneously aligned with queer coming-of-age story collections of previous generations and dexterously subverting and revitalizing the genre, these seven stories offer a glimpse into the future of queer literature. They capture Gen Z's best traits: intuitiveness and self-assurance. The characters are candid and more self-aware than previous generations, but focused on the normal concerns of youth: relationships, sex, work, and how to be a person in the world. The dialogue feels natural and brings each character to life. In "Means to an End," 20-year-old Leonora has dropped out of NYU and is "the fourth tenant of the lesbian love triangle apartment." Her roommates' constant conflict creates a fraught living environment that frames her own low-frequency internal instability as she grows into herself and tries to figure out how to live life on her own terms. Relying on the emotional growth of the characters for propulsion, Zhou scatters her text with poetic gestures that hint at resolution but leave the characters' preoccupations ultimately unresolved. For example, thinking about a tense conversation the night before with a woman she had feelings for, Leonora describes the apartment in detail and notes that "the light was turning soft and forgiving." Then she does the dishes that had caused tension among her roommates the night before: "At the end of the dishes, there was an empty sink. I watched the water run down the drain for a moment." These images suggest that, while the messiness of her life and her relationship with the woman is tidied up for now, a sense of emptiness remains; the character conveys her emotions without directly saying how she feels. The final story, "Gap Year," documents the narrator's life in a series of dated fragments that conclude with an insight that feels true to the protagonists of all the other stories: "Maybe what I was trying to capture in these pages was your sense of purpose, the way you seemed to cut a straight, clear path through the world….[Sometimes you] would make me feel like everything extraneous had fallen away and I lived suddenly in a clean, clear reality that seemed navigable." Could use more polish, but this bright writer is leading the way into an exciting future for queer literature. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.