Like Son

Many interesting plot elements that never coalesce into anything. The novel makes a transgender person the protagonist but treats the transgendered elements as something completely natural and normal.  Here the novel is successful. Like Son accomplishes its goal of creating a normalizing depiction of a transgender person trying to live his life.  While the writer, Felicia Luna Lemus, deserves credit for that, but if gender issues aren’t going to propel the story something else must.  This book has various elements that could fill that space: a mysterious photograph, a love plot set in revolutionary era Mexico, 9/11, parent-child relationships. But the book stays on the edges of all these and has nothing interesting to say about them.  The raw material seems to be there; it just isn't developed.  Inert would be one word to describe this novel. Disconnected would be another.  The prose doesn’t help. The writing at the sentence level is not so much bad as unsatisfying. Reading any one sentence, the prose works okay. Descriptions are serviceable. But the writing never builds to anything and is never remarkable. In the entire book there were perhaps one or two phrases that stood out.