Peterson read: “ The Only Harmless Great Thing” by Brooke Bolander “In over a dozen lifetimes I can recall, I’ve been male and female enough times for those words to mean little more to me than a particular shirt-not who I am.” It’s an important representation of an identity that many readers may find unfamiliar, wonderfully un-tragic, and warmly honest. Iriarte (who is also nonbinary) gives Jamie the courage and self-knowledge we wished we had at that age, and ties their gender identity into their metempsychoses cleverly. But it’s Jamie’s gender identity, and their refusal to live falsely even in the face of isolation and prejudice, that’s the story’s heart. The conceit is lively enough: it’s the intellectual fun of a cozy detective story, with the uncanny echo of a vengeful ghost story, all grounded in an engaging young adult hero. And from what Jamie can discover, Benjamin might have murdered them. Iriarte’s hero, Jamie, is a nonbinary, genderqueer teenager with a secret: they remember their past lives-“not in detail, but like a book I read once and have a few hazy recollections about.” That sort of perspective helps Jamie deal with bigoted bullies that dog them back to the trailer park, but it catches them off guard when their new ex-con neighbor, Benjamin, is someone they knew from their life one previous. Theodore McCombs on “ The Substance of My Lives, the Accidents of Our Births” by José Pablo Iriarte
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