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Nov 17, 2015lostintheshelves rated this title 4.5 out of 5 stars
This is a fantastic novel--beautifully written historical fiction that creates a very strong sense of place and time and explores two very distinctive characters and the subtle shifts of power within their relationship. The sentences are gorgeous, but not distracting, and I raced through the novel wanting to see how the character would grow and change. Ebershoff also manages the difficult job of plausibly imagining how two people from a very different time might have thought about being intersex and transgender at a time when their was no public conversation about those ways of being. My only caveat: the novel is so much of its era it wouldn't be useful for readers who don't know anything about intersex & trans people and are looking for an introduction to those experiences; Lili's analogs today live in a vastly different world that understands and misunderstands them differently. But I can't fault a novel for serving its characters instead of public education.