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hardcover disappeared my original review :((

definitely something here, but could use a couple of rounds of edits. a lot of the metaphors were just not executed elegantly. (vegas = destruction = rebuilding = trans girl) in all, there were some things that resonated with me and some things that seemed a little underbaked or underexplored.

i liked "sexting is roleplay about desire" a lot but truly i am just a sucker for that format. also, this book isnt as hot as people say it is. maybe im just being ace of sexual about it, but idk.

quote: I could not bear to be the mother and the fucker

huuuuge "male professor" vibes from this guy

obsessed with his haters

also idk i think his suggestions are bad mostly, he's like "social media is so bad parents need to get their kids off of social media" yeah man ok good luck with that

this book has taken me probably 5 years to finish because im already quite bad at conceptualizing fictional scenes and there is sooo much annoying flowery posh posturing from these two. it got easier when i realized how far removed the "storytelling" is from the "story." ie red and blue are mostly talking about irrelevant nonsense and that it doesnt have a lot to do with the advertised lesbian time traveling love story.

i do love love letters, and i do love a romance so romantic... i did cry when i read "I would rather break the world than lose you."

i also did not think it had to explicitly reference romeo and juilet the very next chapter, lol, but sure, cement it in there, this is a retelling of romeo and juliet. what if romeo and juliet fought over who would die for the other. what if juliet really did die without hope of coming back. what if romeo resurrected juliet by sheer power of will.

Quote: "I love you. I love you. I love you."

first picked up nevada in 2022 and i still remember feeling terrorized by the first page and having to set it down. the intensity of that first sentence, even, made me so scared. weirdly, it gets a lot less intense from there, or maybe it's just me.

i never got past the first chapter back then, but now it's 2025 and i have. it's kind of a hard read when you're trans, because it's hard to distinguish between the fictional story being told and something that feels more like the clouds parted and the transgender bible dropped from the sky and these are the quotes from it. it's hard for me to think of maria as a character in a way. to me, it's like if all of the shame and doubt and misery and confusion and apathy and care and truth and pride* of being transgender could be pressed on a vinyl record, maria could be the record player.

reading nevada is crazy because at first you're like, oh ive been maria. and then it's like, i think i also shared my first kiss with maria. i think i had a one night stand with maria. i think maria was my first friend after i moved to the city. i think i went on a dozen dates with maria from dating apps. i think maria checked me out at the thrift store. and then every fucking character feels that way too. but of course maria is all the characters, too. she knows that she was james. she probably also knows how she feels about james maybe exactly the way steph feels about her, which makes her steph, too.

i have to say, i dont think it feels intense again until the last 3 chapters when you realize there is no room left for our protags to figure out what theyre doing. i mean the whole time it's like, oh man are they gonna kiss? fuck? something else? and then turning each page closer to the end is like, oh god, it just ends like this, huh? i thought the dread imogen binnie made me feel here is almost worse than when the book started with me thinking maria was going to die. more than anything, i love when an author displays full control of what theyre doing, and binnie has such a command of the intensity it just wows me.

*does maria feel proud of being transgender? i do not invoke pride as in Pride but invoke pride as in the thing that makes you go into a walmart and tell a guy without a college education all about feminist and anarchist theory because youre so knowing and youre doing the right thing by telling him that identifying as an autogynophile is a shaky identity that comes from a shaky sex science and maybe you should really just come out and realize what you are already. (and once again, haven't we all been there? [ml, if youre reading this, im sorry])

quote: "You and me against the rest of the queer community, she says back, only she’s not really kidding."

well, it made me insane so it does get 5 stars. maybe better terminology would be it answers to things i feel insane about. i feel, with this being a letter to his son, a connection to coates as a paternal figure. i think a lot about what to do now that i have been racialized, to be made "of race." i guess in a similar way i used to think about gender and what we sometimes call coercively assigned sex... i guess sometimes i do wish i could say to an elder, "what do i do? there is cruelty in store for me, and there is subjugation, and there is oppression, and i am guaranteed a worse life, a worse life for me because of no reason, a worse and uglier life than the people doing cruelty to me, and what do i do? how do i live?" and i felt held by this work and the ideas and experiences coates shares with us. and a little more at ease, a little more figured out, or that it might be possible for me to figure it out.