Endpapers

by Jennifer Savran Kelly

From the moment I picked up this book and read the synopsis I knew I had to read it because I had never seen a book that seemed so much like its about me. For some context I am an artist who is working as a bookseller because making a career out of art isn’t easy, hell making myself make art isn’t often easy. Our protagonist Dawn is an artist with an upcoming show they are struggling to make art for and in the mean time they work as a bookbinder in a museum (okay a little different than a bookseller but still).

“I’ve been vacant — of ideas, of images and words. So lately I’ve taken to spying, sitting in coffee shops and bars to eavesdrop on conversations.”

-Jennifer Savran Kelly

Dawn is also stuck in a limbo of not knowing what side of the gender binary they belong to if they belong to the binary at all in a time that we didn’t quite have the language we have today to express the things they wanted and needed to express. Though I was much younger, and in a somewhat more accepting time and place, than Dawn is when I started exploring where I belong in a world so set on making you choose just one of two things many of their thoughts and fears mirror exactly what I felt and still feel living in the middle-ground.

This book is simultaneously a portrait of how it feels when you are to queer for the straight community and to straight for the queer community and a stunning example of just how important our communities are to us. Even though Dawn experiences turbulence in just about every relationship that is important to them at the start of the novel it is incredible the way this showcases how relationships and boundaries can and should grow and change as you and the people in your life do.

“She wanted me to learn from her own years of giving in to fear and shame, She wanted me to be true to myself, whatever the perceived cost,”

-Jennifer Savran Kelly

Kelly wrote a wonderful queer found family novel that subverted and exceeded every expectation I had. The writing was so personal while still remaining extremely relatable. No matter who you are or how similar you are to the protagonist this book the journey they take is something that anyone can understand and see yourself as a part of. Despite the fact that the ending made me want more, it was fulfilling in a way that so few books are, which to me is a sign of a great novel. I was pulled in so deeply that, even though this world is technically the world I live in, I felt I was somewhere faraway and I didn’t want to leave.