REVIEW: ROVING PACK by Sassafras Lowrey, or Why Every Straight Parent Needs This Book

This novel, told in the form of diary entries and email, offers a glimpse into the life of a young person who is gender*-fluid, marginalized, at tremendous risk for suicide, homelessness, and victimization by hate crimes, and who finds a tenuous stability in a loosely-woven community, where individual relationships are fragile but the group itself endures. It's extremely well executed, with a strong narrative voice, easy prose, smoothly handled nuances, and action that moves right along. Ultimately, it's a hopeful story, with resourcefulness and loyalty as well as despair. But it's also a disturbing book.

*Gender (as opposed to sex, which is the plumbing and genetics you're born with, or sexual orientation) affects so many aspects of our lives and how we see each other and the world. We grow up being told we're a boy or a girl and what those mean. (Whether we turn out to like boys or girls or both is another matter.) When a person experiences who they are as the opposite sex from the body and identification they've been given, we call them trans-gendered, as opposed to cis-gendered, when it matches. Some people are neither trans- nor cis-gendered; how they see themselves changes, not only from one sex to the other, but neither, something that does not fit into the tidy binary division. One such person is the narrator of Roving Pack, who over time changes name and gender as well as address.

When I made my way through this story, I became aware that I could not read it dispassionately. I could empathize, using my imagination and my past conversations with gay and trans-gendered friends and family. But everything I myself experience is colored by my own gender identification, which is fixed (as opposed to fluid) and congruent with my biology. I waded through the coarse language, the drug addiction, suicide, disease and promiscuity, trying to reserve judgment, trying to listen to what these kids were trying to tell me, to understand their lives in their own terms.

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RIP

Kevin O'Donnell Jr passed away today from lung cancer. Newer writers may not know his name, but for us oldsters, he was not only an innovative writer but an unsung hero of SFWA. His tireless work on behalf of fellow writers through SFWA's Grievance Committee was truly a gift to us all.

That's him in the blue shirt at Baycon 2006, with me and Jeff and Diane Carlson.

I think my favorite memory of Kevin was when I was Secretary of SFWA and he was about to receive an award for his many years of extraordinary service. This was in 2005 in Chicago. Instead of being dutiful, we ran away to the Field Museum and played with the dinosaur skeletons. Afterward, we sat on the steps and at Polish sausages with everything on them. I still see Kevin as he was then, filled with wonder and delight at the world around him, yet with his marvelous imagination working overtime.