Ally’s Reviews > Manhunt > Status Update

The woman who'd broken the back of the Baltimore transsexuals in the early days, when it had been just her and Dr. Raymond, and a few dozen sisters who saw the chance the virus represented.

[Okay, this universe makes a _little_ more sense if it's *actual Janice Raymond* who founded this faction? By leading a guerrilla terrorist unit? At age 78?]

She realized, that in some way she would never unravel, in some strange and hazy confluence of gentleness and violence and self-mortification, Beth was more a woman than she'd ever been.

[THE APOTHEOSIS OF THIS WHOLE THING IS THE PROTAGONIST BEATING THE DEUTERAGONIST AT GENDER!?!?!?!?!?]

She shot back, missed, and blew a passing seagull into blood and feathers. She thought of Randy Johnson's fastball obliterating that bird in midair.

[we have before this moment had no clues that Ramona is either into baseball, or was terminally online when the internet was around]

"It's our turn to do a little raping and pillaging, don't you think?"

[Saturday morning cartoon villain, I am so bored, I wish the book had gotten this bad earlier on so I wouldn't feel compelled to finish]

If it was anyone, it was America, except the feeble old white eugenicists in Washington would never have used men as the vector, would never have risked their precious carcasses, pumped full of teenage blood and transplanted organs.

[does this book seriously take place in the Pizzagate EU?]

The end had left them stiff and fragile, unable to accept that the suburbs were gone, that there was no more escaping the mob, no more pretending floors and toilets scrubbed themselves and reading about Black people in monthly book clubs, the way you'd read about the construction of the London sewers or the history of the fur trade, as a boutique curiosity, instead of actually talking to them.

[narrator's so weird]

[Wait, how did R happen to run into B!?!? How did men attack at exactly the right moment to save R!?!?

What meaning does "slaver" have in the context of a labor monopsony? It feels like we're supposed to be shocked and hate the Screw & Fran but how is assigning residents to manual labor worse than assigning them to "comfort"? Why does the Screw keep this arrangement secret when equivalent power isn't secret?]

[Lee-yo-minster!? LEE-YO-MINSTER!?!?]

"Thufferin' thuccotash! This ith thecond degwee moider!"

[Um wow this passage is so stupid that I can't say anything smarter than 'this is stupid'?]

"I'm going to be a woman here! I'm going to be real!"

[I think we're supposed to hate the pretty girl for being pretty? Or hate the more passable trans girl for being more passable? This trope is gross.]