Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir by Kai Cheng Thom

Rating: 5/5

06/06/2020 - 06/06/2020

"I don’t believe in safe spaces. They don’t exist. I do, however, believe in dangerous stories."

"The world spins and spins. Sometimes, there is nothing you can do but surrender. There is nothing you can do but stand in your best friend's dingy kitchen and bake cakes and cry and hope hope hope for something better to come. Nothing you do will ever stop the world turning, will ever tilt the planet off its axis. All revolutions are futile in the end."

"My body reacted without conscious control, somehow knowing exactly what to do: nothing. I froze, barely breathed. I screwed my eyes shut and prayed, prayed to the roaring swarm, forgive me."

"The reason things didn’t work out between us is because you loved your imaginary revolution more than you loved me, Valkyrie."

"Whenever blood is shed on the Street of Miracles, it’s trans girls who pay, in the end."

"Words have always failed me, I have always failed words, my body is bad it is dangerous it is a bomb about to explode"


Synopsis

Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir by Kai Cheng Thom is the highly sensational, ultra-exciting, sort-of true coming-of-age story of a young Asian trans girl, pathological liar, and kung-fu expert who runs away from her parents’ abusive home in a rainy city called Gloom. Striking off on her own, she finds her true family in a group of larger-than-life trans femmes who live in a mysterious pleasure district known only as the Street of Miracles. Under the wings of this fierce and fabulous flock, Dearly blossoms into the woman she has always dreamed of being, with a little help from the unscrupulous Doctor Crocodile. When one of their number is brutally murdered, the protagonist joins her sisters in forming a vigilante gang to fight back against the transphobes, violent johns, and cops that stalk the Street of Miracles. But when things go terribly wrong, she must find the truth within herself in order to stop the violence and discover what it really means to grow up and find your family.