BOOK REVIEW: *Across the Green Grass Fields* by Seanan McGuire
Another brave child steps through a door. Seanan McGuire's "Wayward Children" series revolves around the notion that doors present themselves to children who -- for various reasons -- don't fit in this world, offering them an opportunity to live for awhile in one or another alternative world where the principles and rules of physics and society and anything else you can imagine may be quite different.
These are stories for kids who feel like space aliens here. I just answered a query on one of my Facebook groups, a meme that read "Sometimes I feel I am not from this world. The gender binary is a myth. Why do you feel like a visiting alien?" McGuire's "Wayward Children" series is not just for those of us whose Difference is about gender, but yeah, most of us know that 'space aliens who belong somewhere else, not here' feeling quite well, don't we?
Across the Green Grass Fields breaks some of the patterns set by the previous books in the series. For one thing, this book is less dark, overall. In this one, no one is dying with their hands chopped off or their eyes surgically removed while they were still alive and conscious; none of the main characters has to experience their lover and companion being killed by their sister, and there are no animated corpses plodding along without their animating spirit. Another thing setting this book apart is that there's no mention of the school, the refuge in the world that we know for all the kids to retreat into when they lose access to their alternative worlds. Be all that as it may, this latest installment fits in nonetheless -- those of us who've read the other books see how this one continues the larger pattern. Regan will end up at the school after the events told in this story.
Regan, the main character, happens to be intersex. Complete Androgen Insensitivy Syndrome (CAIS). XY chromosomes, like a boy, but without a boy's conventional external parts, with the parts that cause one to be classified as a girl instead. She doesn't know this until she becomes concerned that her body isn't changing like that of her friends and expresses this to her parents. From their behavior, she realizes they're keeping something from her, and after some initial relucance they tell her. This is all new and startling information, and she shares it with her best friend, but her best friend is freaked out by it and rejects her.
But the story as a whole is not Regan being intersex. The story is about a girl who ends up in a world populated by centaurs and minotaurs and other variations. It's just a story in which the main character happens to be intersex.
An often-stated wish of LGBTQIA+ readers is for more books where we can read about characters who are like us, not books that are about coming to terms with that difference and coming out and so forth, but ordinary adventures and romances and mysteries and science fiction and fantasy stories where we have people like us appearing in them. Just normalize us into characterhood! Author Seanan McGuire has previously given us lesbian characters (Jack from the first three tales) and a transgender character (Kade) and didn't make the stories About Being a Lesbian (etc), but that's fairly commonplace now. To have an intersex main character in the same sense is considerably less so.
Like all of the books in this series, Across the Green Grass Fields is delightfully whimsical, conjures up a world we can believe in and might want to visit, and lets us follow the tale of a brave hero from the middle school age range. It's written to be appropriate and enticing to readers of that age but to still be fascinating and entertaining to an adult audience as well, and it succeeds in both instances, and I do recommend it.
Now, in the spirit of "a word from our sponsors", a comment about LGBTQIA+ and all that --
Inclusion means, or should mean, more than "Yeah, okay, those people can march with us too, sure, why not, give them a rainbow t-shirt to wear". It means learning about how it is and has been for people whose identifying letter in that acronym are something other than your own.
I'm not intersex myself, but I try to do that, to read and learn about all the different identities and situations that fall into the LGBTQIA+ cluster.
It means including the other folks' situation in your own thoughts and statements. And that, in turn, means more than simply remembering to use the letter "I" as well as "L", "G", "B", and "T". It means undersanding how the issues may look different to them. In the case of intersex, since that's the identity highlighted by this book, for instance, they often hear other people mentioning intersex to counter arguments about physical sex -- as in "well, intersex people exist, so attempting to speak of physical sex, like what makes you female is having a vagina, is factually wrong, physical sex doesn't really exist". Intersex people themselves don't tend to make that kind of statement. And in fact most of the intersex people I've known do not like it when sex and gender are confused! It erases their situation when people think they're the same thing as transgender, or genderqueer or bigender or genderfluid. Because it is their physical sex that sets them apart as different, as being neither male nor female in their body structure. Most of them are not happy if your main takeaway from hearing about the existence of intersex people is that sex -- as distinguished from gender -- doesn't exist!
That's just an example. I could make similar points about bisexuality. That it brings viewpoints and experiences to the table that are different from what lesbians and gay people go through. Think of the Chasing Amy experience -- being rejected by one's lesbian friends as "one of us" for becoming involved with a guy.
At a minimum, we should put the same expectations on ourselves that we put on people who say they are our cisgender / straight allies. We expect the latter to educate themselves. We expect them to go a bit beyond refraining from running around saying transgender and homosexual people are sinful and perverted.
In the name of inclusion, we need to do that for each other.
-------
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts
-------
Do you counsel young people trying to sort out their gender identity? You should read my book! It's going to add a new entry to your map of possibilities when you interact with your clients!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, is also being published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It's expected to be released in late 2021. Stay tuned for further details.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
-------
comments at Dreamwidth -- https://ahunter3.dreamwidth.org/78323.html#comments
These are stories for kids who feel like space aliens here. I just answered a query on one of my Facebook groups, a meme that read "Sometimes I feel I am not from this world. The gender binary is a myth. Why do you feel like a visiting alien?" McGuire's "Wayward Children" series is not just for those of us whose Difference is about gender, but yeah, most of us know that 'space aliens who belong somewhere else, not here' feeling quite well, don't we?
Across the Green Grass Fields breaks some of the patterns set by the previous books in the series. For one thing, this book is less dark, overall. In this one, no one is dying with their hands chopped off or their eyes surgically removed while they were still alive and conscious; none of the main characters has to experience their lover and companion being killed by their sister, and there are no animated corpses plodding along without their animating spirit. Another thing setting this book apart is that there's no mention of the school, the refuge in the world that we know for all the kids to retreat into when they lose access to their alternative worlds. Be all that as it may, this latest installment fits in nonetheless -- those of us who've read the other books see how this one continues the larger pattern. Regan will end up at the school after the events told in this story.
Regan, the main character, happens to be intersex. Complete Androgen Insensitivy Syndrome (CAIS). XY chromosomes, like a boy, but without a boy's conventional external parts, with the parts that cause one to be classified as a girl instead. She doesn't know this until she becomes concerned that her body isn't changing like that of her friends and expresses this to her parents. From their behavior, she realizes they're keeping something from her, and after some initial relucance they tell her. This is all new and startling information, and she shares it with her best friend, but her best friend is freaked out by it and rejects her.
But the story as a whole is not Regan being intersex. The story is about a girl who ends up in a world populated by centaurs and minotaurs and other variations. It's just a story in which the main character happens to be intersex.
An often-stated wish of LGBTQIA+ readers is for more books where we can read about characters who are like us, not books that are about coming to terms with that difference and coming out and so forth, but ordinary adventures and romances and mysteries and science fiction and fantasy stories where we have people like us appearing in them. Just normalize us into characterhood! Author Seanan McGuire has previously given us lesbian characters (Jack from the first three tales) and a transgender character (Kade) and didn't make the stories About Being a Lesbian (etc), but that's fairly commonplace now. To have an intersex main character in the same sense is considerably less so.
Like all of the books in this series, Across the Green Grass Fields is delightfully whimsical, conjures up a world we can believe in and might want to visit, and lets us follow the tale of a brave hero from the middle school age range. It's written to be appropriate and enticing to readers of that age but to still be fascinating and entertaining to an adult audience as well, and it succeeds in both instances, and I do recommend it.
Now, in the spirit of "a word from our sponsors", a comment about LGBTQIA+ and all that --
Inclusion means, or should mean, more than "Yeah, okay, those people can march with us too, sure, why not, give them a rainbow t-shirt to wear". It means learning about how it is and has been for people whose identifying letter in that acronym are something other than your own.
I'm not intersex myself, but I try to do that, to read and learn about all the different identities and situations that fall into the LGBTQIA+ cluster.
It means including the other folks' situation in your own thoughts and statements. And that, in turn, means more than simply remembering to use the letter "I" as well as "L", "G", "B", and "T". It means undersanding how the issues may look different to them. In the case of intersex, since that's the identity highlighted by this book, for instance, they often hear other people mentioning intersex to counter arguments about physical sex -- as in "well, intersex people exist, so attempting to speak of physical sex, like what makes you female is having a vagina, is factually wrong, physical sex doesn't really exist". Intersex people themselves don't tend to make that kind of statement. And in fact most of the intersex people I've known do not like it when sex and gender are confused! It erases their situation when people think they're the same thing as transgender, or genderqueer or bigender or genderfluid. Because it is their physical sex that sets them apart as different, as being neither male nor female in their body structure. Most of them are not happy if your main takeaway from hearing about the existence of intersex people is that sex -- as distinguished from gender -- doesn't exist!
That's just an example. I could make similar points about bisexuality. That it brings viewpoints and experiences to the table that are different from what lesbians and gay people go through. Think of the Chasing Amy experience -- being rejected by one's lesbian friends as "one of us" for becoming involved with a guy.
At a minimum, we should put the same expectations on ourselves that we put on people who say they are our cisgender / straight allies. We expect the latter to educate themselves. We expect them to go a bit beyond refraining from running around saying transgender and homosexual people are sinful and perverted.
In the name of inclusion, we need to do that for each other.
-------
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts
-------
Do you counsel young people trying to sort out their gender identity? You should read my book! It's going to add a new entry to your map of possibilities when you interact with your clients!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, is also being published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It's expected to be released in late 2021. Stay tuned for further details.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
-------
comments at Dreamwidth -- https://ahunter3.dreamwidth.org/78323.html#comments