Being Emily
By Rachel Gold
4/5
()
About this ebook
They say that whoever you are it's okay, you were born that way. Those words don't comfort Emily, because she was born Christopher and her insides know that her outsides are all wrong.
They say that it gets better, be who you are and it'll be fine. For Emily, telling her parents who she really is means a therapist who insists Christopher is normal and Emily is sick. Telling her girlfriend means lectures about how God doesn't make that kind of mistake.
Emily desperately wants high school in her small Minnesota town to get better. She wants to be the woman she knows is inside, but it's not until a substitute therapist and a girl named Natalie come into her life that she believes she has a chance of actually Being Emily.
A story for anyone who has ever felt that the inside and outside don't match and no one else will understand...
"Powerful and empowering, with an optimistic message that we all need more of in our lives. I'm thrilled to see this book is out in the world."—Kate Bornstein, author of Gender Outlaw and A Queer and Pleasant Danger
Being Emily, Winner, Dramatic/General Fiction.
Lambda Literary Awards
Being Emily, Finalist, Transgender Fiction.
Moonbeam Children's Book Awards
Being Emily, Winner Gold, Young Adult Fiction-Mature Issues.
Rachel Gold
Lederhosen. That's just one quirky subject in Rachel Gold's background, and not necessarily a subject you'd expect from a woman who spent seven years working as a reporter on LGBT issues for a Twin Cities newspaper. After branching out into publicity and then marketing, Rachel's life has taken some interesting turns, including winning a national marketing award for using, you guessed it, lederhosen in an ad.GCLS Goldie AwardsJust Girls, Winner, Lesbian Young Adult.Being Emily, Winner, Dramatic/General Fiction.Lambda Literary AwardsBeing Emily, Finalist, Transgender Fiction.Moonbeam Children's Book AwardsBeing Emily, Winner Gold, Young Adult Fiction-Mature Issues.
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Reviews for Being Emily
23 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A really short, sweet, and incredibly tender book. My own personal connection with the main character helped me to overlook the book's flaws, but my inner writer prevents me from giving it a full score.
The author gets preachy, especially when it comes to religion. There are long chapters where the story is told from the point of view of Emily's girlfriend, Claire, where she wrestles with the religious implications of being transgendered. It's an interesting take, yet I couldn't stop myself from skimming when she started recounting Bible passages.
In addition, there are lots of times when the author gets very info-heavy, dumping heavy statistics regarding transsexualism onto the reader. I feel as though that could have been handled in a way that was less like I was suddenly reading a "So Your Child is a Transsexual" pamphlet.
That said, I understand why these infodumps are there. This is not really a book written for a transgender audience, this is one written for someone who doesn't know anything about being trans and is essentially a lesson in it wrapped in the paper of a novel.
With that out of the way, I feel as though I can discuss what I felt is the novel's biggest flaw: it ends too abruptly. The biggest conflict of the novel's last third is once Chris/Emily comes out to her parents as being trans, she has a very hostile relationship with her mother. While we see some growth in how she relates to her father, the end result of that arc is two sentences in the Epilogue, which I found quite insulting. In addition, I would have loved to see more of Emily's journey through school: she is entering her last year of high school going on hormones and they can have a profound effect on one's body within that short time. All of this gets wrapped up in a two page epilogue that feels rather...like a let down.
Still, it's the first book I've read in less than 24-hours in a long time, which goes to say something about its quality. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I’ve been reading a lot of newly released books with transgender characters, so I thought this one might be a bit dated, being published in 2012, but it was one of the better books with transgender characters that I’ve read. I thought it dealt really well with the difficulties in finding acceptance, and gave a lot of information about starting the process of transitioning without coming across as preachy or too dense.