Erin Kimberley's Reviews > Cuckoo

This was for me the most utterly joyless, miserable, pointless slog of any book I have read in the past two years. And I have read over 50 books by trans authors in the past two years, including Felker-Martin's earlier "Manhunt". I was perhaps not in the right, in forcing myself to finish this text.

Structurally, this book has some serious authorial issues which make it just generally a poorly built tale, with too many characters too chaotically juggled to allow for their development to be enjoyable or smoothly conducted. But more generally, it just suffers from its having been written by a seemingly miserable person who seems to want to foist misery and hate and loathing and disgust on all of her characters at all times, in an endless stream of highly repetitive utmost unpleasantness.

I give this work a begrudging one star because I must grant that there are surely others out there as miserable and devoid of joy or hope or love as Felker-Martin herself, who wish to hear their joyless, hateful miserable disgust at humanity and trans lives mirrored back at them. But for me, I do not need the trans experienced given its most hateful and joyless and self-loathing form. That does not enrich my own trans experience, and it is admittedly very difficult to see or understand how it could enrich anyone else's.