Dykette: A Novel

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Are there other books that depict queer friendship and community in ways that helped to inspire Sasha’s world? Sasha starts off well, being able to occupy her most comfortable space, as an observer, she remains separate from the crowd, away from all the puffing and preening. Early in the novel, other than evidence of their strident posture, we don't know much about who Jules and Miranda are.

For a lot of queer people, especially those of us who experienced trauma in childhood, romance can feel like our best hope for love, stability, and safety. Sasha doesn’t get what she wants, but through her, Davis gives us honest if sometimes jumbled insights into a queer domestic fantasy stuck in a version of the past that has never really existed. A novel that can accomplish that complexity while also being wickedly funny, achingly sensitive, readable as hell--simply put, Jenny Fran Davis is a talent. Sasha is high femme, she's in her mid 20s, has exclusively dated butches, and enjoys performing "traditional gender roles" with her partners. Her constant recounting of her neuroses reminded me of that scene in Girls where Hannah is like, “I am thirteen pounds overweight and it has been miserable for me my whole life!Jesse would think bristly nipples were hot, so she snapped a half-hearted picture, but the image on the screen horrified her, and she deleted it quickly. I loved the book’s – for lack of a better term – femme dialectics, and was wondering: What does the term “femme” mean to you today? The games these people play with each other are weird, but not impossible to imagine, until it escalates into painfully absurd territory. It has a lot to say about the generational divides, the difference between a 20-something queer person and a 40-something queer person can be ridiculously vast and Davis spends much of the novel turning this over and looking at it from angle after angle.

The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. What most impressed me about this work is that it feels written for queer readers and doesn't shy away from more nuanced aspects of queer identity and culture; it's rare to see a he/him butch in traditional publishing, for example, but it works so well here. The only thing more horrifying than perceiving one’s self is being perceived by others, and Jenny Fran Davis explores both actions with an audacious and tender wit. The changes in pronouns, the controversy that the characters are going through online (" how could she be a TERF when Twitter alleged she wasn't even a feminist? A modern day bourgeois comedy of manners, that follows three couples of brooklyn-dykes on a winter holiday on Long Island.Not that polyamory is necessarily the better option; I’ve learned the hard way that there’s just as much that can go wrong in an open relationship as in a monogamous one. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.