YA fantasy, nominally, but it overflows both parts of that label. A teenage girl who grows roses from her wrist and who spilled mysteriously out of a water tower when she was five, a teenage boy who paints moons and hangs them from every tree, the bond between them, the family of four red-headed sisters who hold the town in their thrall, and…lots of pumpkins. The feel of a fairytale, or perhaps the feel of what could be told as a standard fairytale but is brought part way down to earth in this telling of it. Contemporary life in a contemporary small town brushed with the fantastical in a matter-of-fact way that makes me think of my (quite limited) encounters with some kinds of Latin/Central American fiction. I think what I most appreciated about it was its prioritization of writing and story over directness. In my experience, lots of YA, including lots of YA that I really like, tends towards the didactic or at least the blunt and clear when it comes to questions of identity and of marginalized experience – naming what needs to be named, using labels the way those who hold them want them to be used, making the shape of such lives evident in ways that even those who do not live them can’t miss. All of which are good things. This book is powerful and moving in how it presents trans and queer lives and makes clear that which requires it, but it does so obliquely, through poetically conveyed experience, including in the mode of the fantastic, rather than simple declaratives. Lovely and distinctive.
Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.