Customer Reviews

Close to Spider Man

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

ivan's is a clear and tender voice that is never sentimental. as a feminist what i found consistently striking was how powerful an unanalytical voice can be when it simply details again and again what it means to experience life as a girl when your imagination is hungry enough to identify and crave the different sorts of freedoms that boys have.

ivan is a performer and each story lends itself to being read aloud . try reading one aloud to yourself and be something new - or remember something lost - in your own imagination.

i recommend this volume to educators looking for appropriate stories for grade and high-school exploration of gender, sexism and homophobia. there is wry gentleness here - an open style that lets the reader choose to do as much work as each is ready to. start with "no bikini."

Ivan E. Coyote is a member of Taste Taste, the lesbian performance collective that published the amazing book Boys like Her a few years ago. This is her first solo story collection, and they're amazing: about growing up as a dyke in the Canadian North. A strong, intimate voice!

These various tales of women growing up queer and as tomboys in the Yukon are all amazing in their wit and their power. Coyote is a member of Taste This, whose book "Boys Like Her" is still one of my favorites. Two of my favorites in the book are "You're Not in Kansas Anymore" where the narrator (Coyote) faces the name she was given at birth and finds one that reflects her real self, and the last story, "Red Sock Circle Dance", which concerns families of choice and a sort of passing the queer torch to a younger generation of queers. I wish this book were longer!

I bought the book because I liked the Youtube video No Bikini, which was based on one of the stories in this book. I was disappointed that the story was only four pages long.

In case you're wondering about the title, one of the stories is about the author going out on the fire escape to spy on an abusive father. Most of the other stories aren't wildly exciting, but who says they have to be? Neither are James Joyce's stories.

One of the stories contains a kitchen recipe interspersed here and there in the narration. Coyote may have borrowed this idea from Like Water for Chocolate by the Mexican writer Laura Esquivel.

She does, however, have one idea which I have never seen before: in a few of the stories, one of the characters is represented with a second person pronoun. It seems that the same character is represented in all of those stories, but I'm not sure.

The stories are easy to read and the book is only 93 pages thick. I would recommend this book for a student who hates to read but has to write a book report.