Imagine the Peter Pan fairy tale reimagined with Pan as a genderqueer leader of homeless genderqueer kids living in their abandoned warehouse Neverland and engaging in leather play. Pan finds Wendi, an orphan living in a group home, and invites her to come be Mommy to the lost bois of Neverland.
The long version:
Let me preface my review by saying Lost Boi is my first foray into genderqueer fiction. After meeting some readers outside the library who asked about queer fiction, it compelled me to do a little digging about a genre that I'd been thinking about only in a very casual way.
My first tack was to look online for queer booklists but soon discovered that much in the way of "queer booklists" used the term "queer" as an umbrella term to include LGBT and Q. I knew I was really on the hunt for genderqueer, or non-binary, and found much fewer lists, much less lists geared toward Young Adult literature. Like the emergence of Transgender Young Adult Fiction three or so years ago, you can feel we're at the birth of a new genre and it shows in how few prominent genderqueer titles there are being published (which is to say I don't necessarily include self-published or e-published books in this group).
Now for Lost Boi: dark and compelling, original, explicit, not for the faint or younger reader. Lowrey does a fantastic job of establishing and maintaining hir own unique tone that posits fairy tale into a very adult world that's replete with homelessness, drug use, S/M and leather play not to mention graphic sex and bondage. Yet she's created an adult fairy tale language full of splendid imagery and detail that establishes this very specific world and people. Not plot heavy, more a memory tale told from one of lost boi's perspectives and is heavy on place and character description.
While not a traditional narrative in which we would find characters described and developed over the course of the story, ze manages to draw some great empathy for hir characters while sticking to hir brand of storytelling. Hir characters were sympathetic while maintaining their hard earned edges. The few glimpses we get about the characters' backstories are specific, brutal and concrete and suffice to paint a vivid portrait of the people we meet along the way.
While it's cataloged as Adult Fiction at my library, and rightly so, the story certainly has an audience with older young adults (let's not get started on the New Adult terminology that sort of drives me nuts and leads me to a tangent that involves advocating for the expanded definition of "Young Adult"). The story's focus is all on young adults likely ranging in age from mid-teens to twenties (Lowrey does an excellent job of, among other things, using ambiguity throughout: encompassing a variety of details such as age and not limited to gender, which seemed to me a salient point, if I were going to draw conclusions). At my library, for example, we have a significant contingent of homeless LGBT patrons who might be quite familiar with much of the darker or brutal aspects throughout the story.
Lowrey also did a fantastic job when it came to hir usage of genderqueer terminology. For someone who had never read any genderqueer fiction, I was able to understand and navigate the ambiguity and complexity of genderqueer vocabulary. In reading and contemplating hir work I visited, and encourage others to visit, her website, to give readers like myself the vocabulary she, as a genderqueer writer, uses to identify herself. While I'm certainly at the beginning of genderqueer fiction reading, having her website gave me a much needed basic vocabulary to describe and discuss both hir work and perhaps genderqueer fiction overall going forward.
Looking forward to seeing what genderqueer fiction has in its future. We are, after all, only at the beginning.
