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Mask of Shadows by Linsey Miller
Feb. 3rd, 2019 12:55 pmMask of Shadows
3/5. Genderfluid street thief joins a hunger games-ish competition to the death to be the queen's next assassin; also, revenge plotting.
The hot-off-the-presses-at-fanfiction.net title gave me concerns, and the start of this book is a bit, well, that. But it gains confidence and momentum, and by the end I was quite enjoying this.
Also, I haven't read that much published fiction about genderfluid people, so maybe this is standard, but I appreciated how this book never bothers to collapse the waveform and tell us what the protag's biological sex is (well, it implies lightly, but you can take that or leave it). This reminded me of a well-meaning but often, uh, interesting friend of mine who read the Ann Leckie books and got obsessed with figuring out what everyone's "real" gender was. Which, yiiiiiikes. Why? And also no. So I think this book would really get under her skin, and that amuses me. Also, it occurs to me that fanfiction about genderfluid people, which I have read a middling amount of, is actually limited in a way, as you generally come to it with a pre-conceived notion of someone's sex.
3/5. Genderfluid street thief joins a hunger games-ish competition to the death to be the queen's next assassin; also, revenge plotting.
The hot-off-the-presses-at-fanfiction.net title gave me concerns, and the start of this book is a bit, well, that. But it gains confidence and momentum, and by the end I was quite enjoying this.
Also, I haven't read that much published fiction about genderfluid people, so maybe this is standard, but I appreciated how this book never bothers to collapse the waveform and tell us what the protag's biological sex is (well, it implies lightly, but you can take that or leave it). This reminded me of a well-meaning but often, uh, interesting friend of mine who read the Ann Leckie books and got obsessed with figuring out what everyone's "real" gender was. Which, yiiiiiikes. Why? And also no. So I think this book would really get under her skin, and that amuses me. Also, it occurs to me that fanfiction about genderfluid people, which I have read a middling amount of, is actually limited in a way, as you generally come to it with a pre-conceived notion of someone's sex.