Review Summaries

• Readers respond to the accessible storytelling and the urgency of the subject. Some value the emotional closeness to the characters, while others find the dense plot or strong premise demanding.

Reviews

• I need more of this

  This book was so much fun! One emotion after another. I love Kivali so much, she's a great lizard. A recommended read if you want to see more enby characters and/or like dystopian novels. I breezed through the book in a few days and I just want More. Overall fantastic💜

• A weird and delightful story

  This book is weird as heck and I love it. The characters are fantastic (especially Kivali herself), the prose and narrative style are pitch-perfect, and the gender stuff made my little nonbinary heart ache. I saw in some other reviews online that a lot of people got hung up on the dystopian setting and not getting answers as to what Lizard Radio really is, and I can't help but feel like they're maybe missing the point of the book a bit? Which, IMO, wasn't to set up a perfectly realistic dystopian future with 1:1 analogues with real world issues, but rather to give a weird teen character a weird setting in which to grow and come to terms with the ambiguities of her identity and the power inherent in declaring herself "both/neither". I could be wrong, though - that was just my interpretation. There are some things I didn't like about this book - one major one is a an extremely unnecessary character death - but overall I really enjoyed it. Basically, I saw a review (can't remember where) before I read the book that called it the author's love letter to gender nonconforming teens, and it really, really is that, as well as a love letter to teens of all stripes whose identities don't conform to what the world wants them to be. I love it for that.

• Dystopian summer camp with magical realism and a nonbinary narrator. And lizard people, possibly. Please let there be a sequel.

  Wow. How to describe this book? Genre-wise it's YA dystopian, more or less, but it's dystopian set at a summer camp, with a dash of magical realism and a distinctly contemporary feel, and spends at least as much time on thoughtful explorations of gender identity, sexuality, first crushes, meditation practices, individuality versus community, and the possibility that the main character might have been abandoned on Earth as an infant by lizard people (yes, really) as it does on the whole fighting-of-repressive-governments thing. It -owns- all of those subjects equally, and the result is lovely and heartbreaking and weird and I adored every page of it. In some ways it reminded me more of Melina Marchetta's Jellicoe Road (another lovely, heartbreaking, weird YA novel that everyone should read) than of most of the dystopians I've read. The narrator's story is deeply personal and raw and very much has its own language, which is pretty much up to the reader to sort out - Kivali's story is Kivali's, and you can come along, but you'd better keep up, because Kivali has enough trouble trying to understand herself without worrying about whether everyone else understands her, too. I say "herself" and "her" because that's what the book description uses, and that's what other characters in the book use to refer to Kivali, but I do so with reluctance, as it's not entirely clear to me that those are the pronouns Kivali would use if given a choice. Possibly my favorite thing about the book-- if I had to pick a favorite-- is how it deals with Kivali's gender and the subject of gender identity in general. Kivali's world is actually one which is totally okay with transgender people... IF those transgender people fit into a very narrow, limiting vision of what it is to be trans, and what it is to be masculine or feminine. It's not really far off from the way that the real-world medical community -- and following their lead, many of the more "progressive" parts of the community at large -- have treated trans folks in recent decades, which is really only starting to change now (and changing very slowly). If -- like Kivali -- you are boy and girl and both and neither, you are frequently still SOL, in Kivali's world or the real one. This is the first book I've read which I felt really hit at the core of that in a believable way, and -- as someone who is nonbinary myself -- I really appreciated it. It's still incredibly rare to see NB characters at all in fiction and rarer still to see them done -well.- Anyway. Lizard Radio is probably not the book for everyone, but gosh, I wish everyone would read it anyway. While I don't think it would speak to every reader equally, or in the same way, I think an awful lot of people who might not immediately -relate- to Kivali's story could nonetheless find some ideas in there seriously worth thinking about. And whether or not YA dystopian is normally your thing, as noted, this is a YA dystopian which... really doesn't feel at all like any other YA dystopian I've read. So-- very much worth giving a try, if you're at all interested.

• A book that sticks with me

  Finally, a story with a trans MC that's not about cis hetero feelings. And is not a totally tragic ending. And is scifi. I've been waiting for a story like this. The lingo definitely makes it hard to get into the story, for me. I didn't find myself able to immerse myself in the story until I got the late teen chapters. Then I said "Screw the lingo, just go with the flow." The author's writing style was a bit weird in many parts for me, but in those tense dramatic parts, they were flawless. The characters became molded and shaped as the story progressed, Kivali included. And it was beautiful to read. I would hope this is continued.

• The best genderqueer book. Ever.

  Finally. A book for us. A book for XX genderqueers, for trans* psychics, for people who live in an otherworld of gender, of thought, of sensation. I cried so many times reading this. Not because of things that happened in the story, but because of tender moments of validation of the genderqueer experience, because the trans person is powerful and complex and vulnerable, and because they live. And thanks to Pat for being a good writer. For making the story weird and interesting and gripping. I want everyone I know to read this book. Thanks for speaking up, thanks for creating a story that mirrors these parts of our lives and experiences. I am so so so grateful.

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