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Mar. 31st, 2025 10:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsLet's start with the most fraught thing: Naomi Kanaki's Just Happy To Be Here is a book about a trans girl whose parents are on tenuous visas in a trans-unfriendly state, which came out in January 2024. That is simultaneously no time ago and a year ago and a hundred years ago, on the specific axes of criminalization and demonization of trans kids and immigrants in the US, and at various points in the book it feels like all of those things.
That said! This is not the plot of Just Happy To Be Here, although of course it runs through the whole background of the book and the choices that our heroine Tara is making, because how can it not. The plot of the book is that Tara wants to join the cool secret Classics society at her elite private girls' school, the Sybils, wherein two girls are chosen every year by making a great speech about their favorite Classical Woman and then they all get to hang out together in the Classical Woman clubhouse being weird and intense and and calling each other by their secret Classical Woman names and swearing oaths to each other to "never forget my cruelty, my courage, my ambition."
The cool secret society also comes with a cool secret huge scholarship, which is no longer secret because one of the extant Sybils (self-named Strife) decided to spill the beans and caused an enormous scandal ... so now everyone assumes that Tara is gunning for the scholarship, or to make a point about Joining While Trans, when in fact the real truth is that Tara loves Rhetoric and Speeches, and loves the idea of being a weird intense girl who LARPS as a Classical Woman, and also has a huge crush on Felicity aka Antigone, and was too distracted by all of this to pay attention to the scholarship situation at all. Although now that she is paying attention, the scholarship would change her life significantly for the better, also.
Naomi Kanakia is and has always been a profoundly honest writer; it's my favorite things about her books. Everyone in this book is coming from a real place and has a real perspective, and those all intersect with each other in ways that will, inevitably, cause tension. Nothing is simple, except sometimes some things can be simple: sometimes people just click. As soon as Tara starts spending time with Antigone and the other Sybils, they do click. While everyone around them gets progressively weirder about the idea of trans Indian girl Tara joining Classical Woman Club -- in all directions, including her aggressive supporters who refuse to listen to her about the way in which she wants to be supported -- Tara and the Sybils are falling in love with each other, and it's the emotional core of the book and it's lovely.
That said! This is not the plot of Just Happy To Be Here, although of course it runs through the whole background of the book and the choices that our heroine Tara is making, because how can it not. The plot of the book is that Tara wants to join the cool secret Classics society at her elite private girls' school, the Sybils, wherein two girls are chosen every year by making a great speech about their favorite Classical Woman and then they all get to hang out together in the Classical Woman clubhouse being weird and intense and and calling each other by their secret Classical Woman names and swearing oaths to each other to "never forget my cruelty, my courage, my ambition."
The cool secret society also comes with a cool secret huge scholarship, which is no longer secret because one of the extant Sybils (self-named Strife) decided to spill the beans and caused an enormous scandal ... so now everyone assumes that Tara is gunning for the scholarship, or to make a point about Joining While Trans, when in fact the real truth is that Tara loves Rhetoric and Speeches, and loves the idea of being a weird intense girl who LARPS as a Classical Woman, and also has a huge crush on Felicity aka Antigone, and was too distracted by all of this to pay attention to the scholarship situation at all. Although now that she is paying attention, the scholarship would change her life significantly for the better, also.
Naomi Kanakia is and has always been a profoundly honest writer; it's my favorite things about her books. Everyone in this book is coming from a real place and has a real perspective, and those all intersect with each other in ways that will, inevitably, cause tension. Nothing is simple, except sometimes some things can be simple: sometimes people just click. As soon as Tara starts spending time with Antigone and the other Sybils, they do click. While everyone around them gets progressively weirder about the idea of trans Indian girl Tara joining Classical Woman Club -- in all directions, including her aggressive supporters who refuse to listen to her about the way in which she wants to be supported -- Tara and the Sybils are falling in love with each other, and it's the emotional core of the book and it's lovely.
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Date: 2025-04-01 07:25 am (UTC)That sounds relatable. I am glad the core of it is requited.
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