Book Review: Genderqueer: Maia Kobabe (2019)

by Abbigale Kernya, ​for The 44 North

Managing Editor

The book cover of Genderqueer by Maia Kobabe

Genre: Memoir, Graphic Novel, Queer Literature

“Some people are born in the mountains, while others are born by the sea. Some people are happy to live in the place they were born, while others must make a journey to reach the climate in which they can flourish and grow. Between the ocean and the mountains is a wild forest. That is where I want to make my home.”

― Maia Kobabe, Genderqueer

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This 2019 memoir by author, advocate, and storyteller Maia Kobabe (e/em/eir) is a tender journey through childhood to adolescence, exploring gender expression and the anxieties of growing up. It’s a beautiful walk with time and acceptance of oneself—a teacher, a guide, and at times, a friend. 

It’s also been banned in Alberta schools. 

Genderqueer follows Maia Kobabe from infancy to adulthood, where the first memories of gender confusion and dysphoria peak through the pages. This is a memoir where self-love, kindness, and acceptance of the people around you are seen as radical and sexually explicit. When I first heard that Alberta was banning over 200 books from public school libraries, alarm bells immediately started going off. In my research to not only read a banned book, but also to recommend it to my readers, Genderqueer climbed to the top of my list after Alberta’s Minister of Education, Demetrios Nicolaides, released a list of “sexually explicit” and “harmful” books found in school libraries on X.

Imagine my shock, then, when I began reading this graphic novel and found that the only sexual red flag was the conservative projection of homophobia and transphobia that turns a peaceful recount of gender exploration into sexually explicit content.

Kobabe shares a story that is full of hope—one that is importantly what eir needed when eir was younger. The frustration and self-hatred of not having any non-binary or asexual representation when Kobabe was growing up cost eir friendships, relationships, and peace within eirself. I found the most important part of this novel to be when Kobabe—after years of thinking eir were “wrong” or “broken” for not fitting traditional masculine or feminine gender roles—finds eirself in a teaching position looking out onto the sea of students and realizing this is eir’s chance to be the change eir needed when eir was young. 

On the flip side, this story that beautifully recounts childhood innocence and welcomes in a new wave of kindness and “radical” acceptance has been constantly demonized by right-wing parties as sexually explicit. In flipping through these pages, I had a hard time coming up with examples to fit their narrative. 

Is it sexually explicit to talk about periods and pap smears?

Or talking about sex in a natural and relatable way?

Perhaps dismantling gender roles and the sexualization of young girls is too “radical?”

Or maybe it was too sexually explicit to depict gender dysphoria in a raw and honest way that not only acts as a refuge for those needing representation, but also as a learning opportunity for those looking to understand their neighbour. 

Kobabe’s journey from a fanfiction writing tween struggling to understand why eir can’t move through life equal to eir’s peers, to an adult on a mission to ensure no other transgender children feel the alienation or sense of “wrongness” that filtered through eirs childhood is as memorable as it is raw. One particular scene that really drove this message home for me was an earlier recount of when Kobabe transitioned from homeschool to public school, and feeling like eir was eons behind social norms than eirs female classmates for not understanding why women have to shave their legs, why they cannot swim with their shirt off, or why girls were so obsessed with boys. It was this novel’s transition from a sense of other to togetherness that filled this story not with sadness, but instead a profound message of hope. 

Maia Kobabe’s Genderqueer opened my eyes to a new perspective—the end goal of any great novel, I am so bold as to claim. Yet, it is hard to understand how a government could remove this teacher from shelves in the act of “protecting children” when unrestricted internet access and the normalization of extremely harmful actual pornographic content (found everywhere on Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube) are left out of the conversation. How is this novel—detailing the journey from self-hatred to self-love—harmful?

I’ll save you the trouble: it’s not. 

The fearmongering of queer spaces through the right-wing dog whistle of “protecting the children” isn’t about children at all: it’s about enacting harmful narratives to raise a generation that fears each other and anyone who dares to live authentically. The most important role we have now as an audience is to read and surround ourselves with as many “radical” perspectives as possible, ensuring everyone is given the same right to go through this life with peace, kindness, love, and respect. 

Book Review: Normal People (2018)

by Abbigale Kernya, ​for The 44 North

Managing Editor

The book cover of Normal People by Sally Rooney

Genre: Literary Fiction

“Marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn't know if she would ever find out where it was or become part of it.”

― Sally Rooney, Normal People

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I’ve written before about how university, for me, was quite a lonely experience. The movies and TV shows I watched growing up—depicting college or university as this “straight out of a movie” experience—set me up for a sore disappointment when I found myself unable to adapt to the fast-paced, extroverted lifestyle I expected. I found it hard to make friends, and even harder to keep them. Romance was daunting, and building a dating profile was near impossible when I really didn’t have a sense of who I was staring back at the screen. 

It was lonely, and I didn’t quite know how to grapple with the slow disappointment (in myself) that I wasn’t making the life I had imagined for myself only months before. I’d never seen anything in the media painting university as grey, damp, and a slow mental descent into isolation until Sally Rooney’s Normal People came across my screen. The 2018 novel was adapted into a TV series two years after publication, and after seeing just one trailer for the show, I immediately bought the book.

Connell Waldron is me, and I, unfortunately, was him in university. The book follows Connell from high school to Trinity College in Dublin, alongside his long-time situationship, Marianne Sheridan, as they traverse every embarrassing aspect of adulthood—for better or for worse—together. Connell, who was the star-studded high school athlete, suddenly finds himself without meaning as he walks quietly through his college classes in sour distaste for everyone around him. Marianne, as his better half at the worst of times, opposingly and finally finds her stride in college, stepping out of the depressive and anxious mental health spiral she (through no fault of her own) spent the past few years suffering alone in. 

It’s a tale as old as time. A smart girl suddenly gets pretty, and a jock boy learns empathy. However, Sally Rooney has an unbelievable way of taking these character tropes and ripping them apart in a revolutionary and refreshing way. Connell is a villain in his own story, and Marianne can’t escape the chains she was swaddled in. The story follows these two as they try to bury themselves in each other, in the competitive, insatiable craving to reinvent themselves, and in the understanding that everyone else around them kind of sucks. But maybe that’s the whole point. Maybe everyone is just as miserable and maybe that makes it not so bad in the end. 

Set in university, this tale of romance and self-discovery is tinged with the aftertaste of soured desire so invigorating and addicting you can’t help but place yourself somewhere alongside the characters on the page. Whether it be a desire for connection or a sense of self, Rooney captures the existentialism of post-secondary perfectly. 

It captures the feeling of watching your life pass you by while you stand watching, not knowing if you should run to catch up with it or if it was ever yours in the first place. College and university are a nauseating experience for some of us. It’s never how you thought it would be: love, sex, money, friends, politics, peace within yourself—everything becomes unfamiliar. 

Everything except the pieces of yourself you will inevitably find in these characters. 

For better or for worse, I found solace in knowing someone else had felt what I was feeling, strong enough to create an entire series depicting it in high definition. From the page to the screen, university for me felt like a poorly written chapter in the Sally Rooney universe, and honestly, I think I’m better off because of it.

I find myself at the end of this review feeling that no matter what I write, the power of Rooney’s work—the life she breathes into characters on the page—will always be somewhat of an injustice. Normal People is the one book I wish, more than anything, I could go back to and read again for the first time. The complicated strings that bind every one of her characters together—whether involuntary or not—struck a new spark in me as someone who, much like the two stumbling protagonists, had no idea why I ended up anywhere and even less what to do with the life handed to me. From class inequality spelled out on the page to the urge to prove your womanhood in an extreme fashion, Normal People depicts, better than any other piece of fiction I’ve ever read, what college is really about and the people we bring with us in life.

For better or for worse, at times. 

“All these years, they’ve been like two little plants sharing the same plot of soil, growing around one another, contorting to make room, taking certain unlikely positions.”

― Sally Rooney, Normal People

Book Review: Gallant by V.E. Schwab (2022)

by Abbigale Kernya, ​for The 44 North

Managing Editor

The book cover of Gallant by V.E. Schwab

Genre: Fantasy, Horror, Gothic fiction

“I slept in your ashes last night. It was like you laid your shadow down before you left. It smelled like hearth smoke and winter air. I made a blanket of the empty space. I pressed my cheek against the place where yours had been.”

—V.E. Schwab, Gallant

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Whenever I wrap up with a semester, I have a terribly hard time reading. It seems counterproductive given that my entire degree is based around reading novels at an inhumane pace and pumping out 1500 word essays on whatever repeating prompt my professor handed out that week.

In my prime, I could read three novels a week. Now having graduated and spent a month moving back to my parents’ house with more time on my hands than I will ever have again in life, picking up a book is a monumental task. Even on vacation last week, picking out a beach read consisted of me sitting around the bags of books packed up and ready to take on my road trip across the country that felt reminiscent of staring at a blank canvas and waiting for a painting to appear. It was like I had lost a sense of who I am as a reader. 

That is until I remembered my Audible credits that had been building for the better half of the semester and suddenly a glimmer of hope reignited back to my Goodreads reading challenge and I felt that maybe, this could be my chance to get back into the groove. 

I had read V.E. Schwab’s other young adult fantasy books before, and remembered feeling like they had done themselves a disservice by marketing itself to a younger audience. Her writing is as sophisticated as it is dreamy, and I lost myself those years ago drowning in the little worlds she created on the page. When Gallant appeared on my Audible suggested list, it was a no-brainer. 

In V.E. Scwab fashion, the writing in this short stand alone launches it to a new level of magical to a haunting degree. It follows young Olivia as she traces her family footprints from escaping the orphanage she was left at to answering a mysterious note written by her dead uncle—winding up at the very house her mother and father died to keep her from. But after all, how dangerous can a house be when the promise of family outweighs the ghouls that haunt her anyways? If I was plagued by the undead, I know I would want to do it in a mansion surrounded by other, somewhat…peculiar people. 

Olivia comes to a head with her supernatural gift and the challenged Gallant offers her in exchange for a remedy to her loneliness. With her cousin Matthew at odds with her and Olivia at odds with the mysterious curse around her namesake, she undergoes an adventure that could cost her everything with the promise of everything. 

I listened to this book in a matter of days, always looking for excuses to go on walks or lounge by the resort’s pool absentmindedly in order to keep digging this mystery until it reveals itself in an unwinding web of V.E. Schwab’s brilliant storytelling. It was exactly what I needed to get back into reading. The blend of the gothic, mystery, found family, and a generational stain waiting to be cured, Gallant was an easy five star read. 

“I slept in your ashes last night. It was like you laid your shadow down before you left. It smelled like hearth smoke and winter air. I made a blanket of the empty space. I pressed my cheek against the place where yours had been.”