Deer

Hello Darlings, I'm Deer, and I’m very happy to be part of the KNONK collective (and host for our book club). I love to read, and you can find some of my book reviews below. I also made a zine a number of years ago, and you can read that here:

Defiant for Life

Recovering from sexual violence

A hopeful zine about living with trauma.

My posts (on this page):
Stag Dance
Ocean's 11
Less
Calendar Girls
Bad Behaviour
Detransition, Baby!
This is Pleasure

So I picked this up because of how much I loved Detransition, Baby! It’s a collection of shorter stories, written over a ten year span, all of them centring trans female characters. As always with a collection, I liked some more than others. The central story, Stag Dance, is quite long and set in the old west and I just didn’t really connect with that one.

The first story jumps back and forth to different times before and after the trans apocalypse, and ends so abruptly that I initially thought the second story was a flashback inside the first. That's my bad though. They are good stories, quite violent, with boldly drawn contrasts.

For example, the last story is about a young cross dresser/cam boy/trans woman who gets involved with two people on a trip to Vegas: an overbearing trans woman who declares herself her big sister and envisions the two of them bra shopping, and a married man with a cross dressing secret who plays on her daddy fantasies.

I think out of the four I liked this story best, but it feels so heavy-handed, the choice the main character has to make, and the two characters she chooses between. These stories seem to lack the nuance and complexity of Detransition, Baby! Maybe that's because they are short stories.

I look forward to reading what Torrey Peters writes next. book-review queer fiction

Ocean’s 11 was in the “hat” (it’s a tub actually) for Pigeon’s Lucky Dip DVD night, and it was actually the first time I’d seen it. I will contrast my expectations of this quite famous film with my actual experience, and then we’ll see where we get to.

So my knowledge of the Ocean’s series was actually quite limited. They’re heist films where a bunch of guys led by George Clooney and Brad Pitt rob a casino. The last film was all women, so that’s nice. That’s all I really knew. Here’s what I expect from a heist film. First, you need to set up the challenge: there are guards here, we need a code for this door, what have you. Then, there is a Cunning Plan^TM to deal with these challenges. In the execution of the plan, stuff goes wrong (plan < contact with the enemy) but the heisters pull it over to their side and win in the end. That’s the formula.

Ocean’s 11 deviates from this traditional pattern in two important ways. One, we are not told the plan. We don’t even find out what they’re doing as they are doing it, we are hoodwinked along with the casino owner (Andy Garcia, easily the sexiest in this sexiest man line-up). Which is fine, the cleverness of the plan makes for a good surprise when it is revealed, but it does mean you spend much of the film without any clue as to what’s going on, and whether they are winning or losing. So, upsides and downsides to that decision.

More importantly, the film-makers just don’t play fair. Just to pick on one detail: what would you do if you found a stranger’s burner phone in your pocket? “Answer when it rings” is not top of my list, let me tell you. But the whole plot hinges on that phone call going exactly the way they want.

There’s many of these “but wait a minute” fridge-thought moments that you don’t spot at the time because you’re not clued in to what the plan is, but that leave you feeling robbed when it’s over. A little bit of plot immunity for the heroes is forgivable, but these guys get away with bloody murder. Also, the “winner gets the girl” plot is so last millennium, guys. Do better.

I guess people love Ocean’s not so much for the tight plotting as for the joy of watching a bunch of shiny movie stars swanning it up in Vegas and trading witty dialogue. It does deliver on that. Well done, gentlemen.
*polite applause*

Delightful. Less is a funny and poetic book about a Arthur Less, a minor American novelist who can’t face either being at the wedding of his ex boyfriend, or staying home for it, so he accepts all the invitations to conferences, teaching positions, interviews, travel writing opportunities and trips he normally refuses and sets off on a journey around the world.
What follows is a series of mishaps and indignities (not least of which is his fiftieth birthday) as well as unlikely hook-ups and encounters with friends and exes. We learn things about the nature of time, and memory, and love. The helpless resignation with which our hero Less meets his misfortune and the loving, yet mocking omniscient narrator give the book a sweet atmosphere, and keep it from being too nostalgic or sappy.
I enjoyed it a lot.

Recommended for:

1. romantics
2. gays
3. vicarious travel enthusiasts

Won Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2018

Pleasant but silly film about middle aged women raising money for charity with a nude calendar. The jokes are mild, the drama is forced, and the whole thing would have been a yawn-fest except for Helen Mirren. I just love her.

I was strongly recommended this and after trying to read it I didn’t want to ask why.
If I’m going to read a book with this much sadomasochistic sex, I’d like it if anyone was actually enjoying themselves.

Recommended if you like:

1. Bad sex
2. Human misery
3. ???

One of my top reads of 2025. The story is about a complex family trying to form: a detransitioned trans woman gets his boss pregnant and is asking his ex (a transwoman) to join them and be the second mother to the baby.
Most of the book is actually the character’s back stories, how they got to be who they are and why this crazy premise actually makes a kind of sense, maybe. It’s very queer, it’s funny and sad and hopeful without sanding down the rough edges.
I don’t identify as trans but reading this felt like a window into trans female experiences that an educational text just couldn't ever offer. And I value it deeply for that.

Recommended if you like:

1. Queer drama
2. Trans rights

Ooh, #metoo fiction with some nuance and room for interpretation? In this timeline? My goodness.
This is a novella about a Bad Man that asks: but how bad? Where is the line and when did he cross it?
Reading other reviews I can see they are all over the place. From sympathy for the Bad Man character to full throw-away-the-key condemnation. I think it’s a good book, it’s well written and I feel like I’m better for having read it.

Recommended if you like:

1. Complexity and nuance
2. Short books