Reviews

Yabo by Alexis De Veaux

sweddy65's review

4.0

I liked this book so much, I am hoping to incorporate a book group into this year's Grand Junction Pride focused on this: race, sexuality, intersex, myth, history.

wall0w's review

mysterious reflective fast-paced

4.5

Interconnecting stories about intergenerationally connected queer people across multiple points in time. It slaps.

i_will_papercut_a_bish's review

5.0

Wow. Yabo crawled into my skin and stuck to all my ribs; I'm fairly certain I'll never shake it. This is a book that alters you. The narrative wove in and out of many stories and time periods, stripping my mind down and demanding attention until a huge story was told in the span of two hours. Potent. Will read again and highly recommend.

meganmilks's review

5.0

Read for my new book club! In gorgeous prose, de Veaux maps intersex (and nonbinary) gender onto/alongside the simultaneity of time. Both/neither simultaneously. Structural similarities to Nalo Hopskinson's The Salt Roads, with three main overlapping settings and storylines -- weaving together characters in Jamaica, North Carolina, New York; many slippages here, all kinds of fluidity (gender, time, genre, subjectivity), hella queerness. Also engages poignantly and critically with the history of slavery in New York. Huge huge world in 160 pages.

hmoog's review against another edition

challenging emotional mysterious reflective fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes

4.75

pintobeans's review against another edition

emotional reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix

5.0

Of all the books I’ve read in the last decade, this one is by far my favorite. It’s a collection of short stories and poems. It’s a coming of a age collection on the planes of gender, sexuality, and Blackness

competencefantasy's review

3.0

So, I love what this was trying to do thematically. I'm not sure if it succeeded at it though with me. There was a lot of sex, which isn't itself a problem but I had difficulty keeping the characters straight because they were all having so much sex. Interesting countercultural sex in some cases... but it was a problem for me. Part of me thinks that since the timeline blending was deliberate that the effect might have been intentional but it came across less linked and liminal than fuzzy and homogenized.

the other trigger for me is ...

Spoiler

there's a plotline about a professor sleeping with the student she is advising. And yes I know she's of age, depiction not endorsement, etc. I'm a woman in love with a woman older than me myself, I'm no prude. But teacher student is a hard hard no for me and there was no way to avoid it in this book because there is no way to tell what the book is about without reading it.