Detransition, baby : a novel /

Peters's sharp comedy (after Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones) charts the shifting dynamics of gender, relationships, and family as played out in three characters' exploration of trans femininity. Reese, a trans woman from the Midwest now living in New York City, is in the throes of an affair with a kinky, dominant, and married man. Ames, Reese's ex who has detransitioned since their breakup three years earlier, is now with his boss, a divorced cis woman named Katrina. When Katrina gets pregnant, Ames must reckon with his gender once again. Katrina intends to get an abortion if Ames leaves her, and he comes up with a solution so crazy it just might work. He cannot be a father, but he can be a parent ("He knew, however, that Katrina didn't have the queer background to allow for that distinction"), and Reese, more than anything, wants to be a mother; desperate, Ames asks Reese if she will be a co-mother; he also confesses to Katrina that he once lived as a woman. As Reese, Katrina, and Ames reckon with the possibility and difficulties of forming a family, their quick wit gets them through heavy scenes (Reese on Katrina's "AIDS panic": "How retro"). Peters conceives of a world so lovable and complex, it's hard to let go. Agent: Kent Wolf, Neon Literary. (Jan.)

Peters's debut is a beautiful, heart-wrenching, gut-punching and captivating story, in which listeners want to cheer and embrace the characters one moment, and tell them off in the next. Here, three people try to define the concept of family when confronted with an unplanned pregnancy. There's Reese, a transgender woman who always longed to be a mother; Katrina, a cisgender woman who's grappling with whether to keep the baby; and Ames, who lived for six years as a transgender woman before "detransitioning," going back to the gender he was assigned at birth. Ames proposes that he, Reese (his ex), and Katrina (his current lover) raise the child together. It's a wonderful tale to listen to, especially with Renata Friedman's artful narration. VERDICT The buzz surrounding Peters's novel is well-deserved. The further listeners get into the story, the more they'll appreciate the complex characters struggling to define the concept of parenthood.--Gladys Alcedo, Wallingford, CT

A wonderfully original exploration of desire and the evolving shape of family. Reese's specialty is horrible married men--and she has carefully analyzed all the reasons why. She is, in fact, exquisitely self-aware when it comes to her self-destructive tendencies. When her ex, Ames, asks her to be a second mother to the baby his lover, Katrina, is carrying, Reese knows exactly why she doesn't say no: She believes that motherhood will make her a real woman. Ames has issues of his own. Fatherhood is not a role he wants for himself--which is not to say that he doesn't want to be a parent. It's his hope that, by bringing Reese into their ménage, he might make Katrina consider other, less binary, possibilities. Set in New York and peopled with youngish professionals (and folks who are, at least, professional-adjacent), this novel has the contours of a dishy contemporary drama, and it is that. What sets it apart from similar novels are the following details: Reese is a trans woman, and, when she and Ames were together, Ames was Amy and also a trans woman. Detransitioning--returning to the gender assigned at birth after living as another gender--is a fraught subject. People who change their minds about transitioning are often held up as cautionary tales or as evidence that trans identity is a phase or a sickness, not something real. Peters, a trans woman, knows this, and, in Ames, she has created a character who does not conform to any hateful stereotype. Ames is, like every other human, complicated, and his relationship to his own body and his own gender is just one of his complexities. Reese is similarly engaging. She's kind of a mess, but who isn't? There's no question that there will be much that's new here for a lot of readers, but the insider view Peters offers never feels voyeuristic, and the author does a terrific job of communicating cultural specificity while creating universal sympathy. Trans women will be matching their experiences against Reese's, but so will cis women--and so will anyone with an interest in the human condition. Smart, funny, and bighearted. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.