At the Broken Places

March 1, 2017
In this affecting joint memoir, a mother and son recall the often-fraught process of the son's transition from a girl to a boy, a process that nearly destroyed their relationship. Now reconciled, their collaboration on this book is seamless and lucid, always well written and informative as they address four major subjects: pronouns and body parts, the mother's sense of loss versus the son's sense of discovery, the disclosure game, and their shifting sense of rights as parent and child, all of these addressed individually by each of the collaborators. For the perplexed, a useful recurring feature of the book is a sidebar called Word Bank, which defines the trans vocabularygender, gender dysphoria, transition, top surgery, etc.common words that in this context acquire uncommon meaning and help people understand and talk knowledgeably and sensitively about a complex situation. The book is an altogether invaluable and accessible addition to the growing body of transgender literature.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)