Joy Reads Books

Tag: net galley

  • A Call to Honesty and Love: Review of Trans Memoir “Calling My Deadname Home”

    A Call to Honesty and Love: Review of Trans Memoir “Calling My Deadname Home”

    Literary review of a memoir of a transgender man’s journey to find love and acceptance.

    Cover of the memori, "A Call to Honesty and Love: Calling My DeadnameHome" by Avi Ben-Zeev

    Dr. Avi Ben-Zeev’s memoir, “Calling My Deadname Home”, is an extraordinary and heart wrenching journey through time to reconnect and let go of his former, female self, Talia. Growing up in a working-class family in Israel, Dr. Ben-Zeev only just finished high school, yet now holds a PhD in Cognitive Psychology, an expert in stereotype threat and implicit bias, he is a writer and professor.

    This is a beautiful, heart wrenching gift of a book. There are books that enter our life and lodge themselves directly into our heart with their brevity, love, and honesty. This was one of them. 

    “Calling My Deadname Home” is told in three parts – early transition, later transition, and Talia’s story. There is a sense that Talia was in constant flight from the imprisonment of her self and her past and only when Avi reconciles this sense of imprisonment and the sacrifice that Talia is safely freed. 

    At no point will Avi or Talia sacrifice their authenticity, the driving force within themselves to act in what seems to be a just way. We see this in Talia’s determination to avoid her mandatory service in the IDF. 

    Their journey is one that shows us we are not just one aspect of our personality, one traumatic event, or one action we regret. We are all of these things and none of them at the same time as there’s always an opportunity for forgiveness and love. “Calling My Deadname Home” is as unflinchingly honest as its writer as he moves in the world. There are themes of self-loathing, particularly in regard to the sexual assaults of young Talia and the lasting traumas. 

    A beautiful, heart wrenching gift of a book.

    Avi writes with such honesty that Talia’s loss of self and pain is palpable on the page. 

    There is sex, some of it kinky, and I feel like straight vanilla folks will view the sex as “graphic” simply because the bodies doing it are not cisgender. There’s no need to clutch any pearls and they’re in fact written a lot better than most sex you encounter in current books and most importantly, it’s between consenting adults. 

    Definitely recommend to readers interested in gender studies, trans experience, and the non-Western experience. There are a lot of books in the world about cis white dude’s experience, “Calling My Deadname Home” is the brutally honest opposite of that and I’m better for having read it. We should all listen to more voice’s like Avi’s.

    “Calling My Deadname Home” will be published 14 November 2024 by Muswell Press. Thanks to the publisher for providing early review copies to NetGalley.

    View of British Columbia's Sunshine Coast. Long grasses line a pebble beach covered in driftwood. Tall evergreens and a mountain are in the background, the sky is an incredible cerulean blue with white wispy clouds.

    A view of the Sunshine Coast, where I was visiting when I read this spectacular memoir.

  • Tales of Koehler Hollow: Reclamation, Oral Traditions and Black Love

    A review of “Tales of Koehler Hollow”, a collection of family stories from a formerly enslaved women.

    Image of the book cover of Tales of Koehler Hollow, aged paper background with images of dried flowers

    Tales of Koehler Hollow tells the story of Amy Finney, a formerly enslaved woman, and her descendants who established a homestead of family and community in the Appalachian Mountains. The stories are told simply through the voice of Amy’s great-great granddaughter, Naomi Hodge-Muse, and collected by anthropologist Christopher A. Brooks. 

    The stories in this collection draw on the oral tradition of storytelling and reading it felt very much like sitting with a beloved auntie, so effectively did Dr. Brooks captures Hodge-Muse’s voice. There is very little in the way of superfluous language or lengthy descriptions, people are introduced with tenderness and care but there is honesty and acknowledgement that people are complicated and flawed. I was struck by the way Hodge-Muse described complicated family members, acknowledging the difficulties of growing up with an emotionally immature mother but also we know her mother was loved and more than a selfish, flighty woman.

    The African-American experience is one that has been often marred by violence and loss, but in this anthology we are presented with a family that is strong, complex and driven to remain in community. There is devastating loss and violence, but it is recounted with the same calm tenor found in the rest of the collection.

    Tales of Koehler Hollow is an important book to read and I’m grateful for the opportunity. History is often controlled by the powerful, they had the money to create records and steal people from their homes. Having this record of Amy and her family’s experience is a gift. Dr. Brooks has helped preserved this family’s history in a restorative way, a long, long time after their history was brutally ripped away. This collection is an extension of what drove Amy to establish the family homestead – without that grounding, we wouldn’t have this collection of stories, as told through Naomi Hodge-Muse.

    Tales of Koehler Hollow is available for purchase at Unsung Voices Books.