Reviews

Faltas: Letters to Everyone in My Hometown Who Isn't My Rapist by Cecilia Gentili

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readmymind's review

emotional funny hopeful medium-paced

5.0

This is an astonishing, devastating, and often quite funny memoir in letters. It's absolutely tiny and quick to read but is really beautifully written. Gentili is scathing and searching in these letters to the friends, villains, and family of her childhood. The rape of the title is threaded throughout the stories as she puzzles through the ways that her community gave cover to a serial predator and tried to subdue and control her as a young trans person figuring things out. This book is surprising and witty and unique and I loved it!

tbrnichols's review

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challenging emotional medium-paced

4.0

Despite describing an upbringing wildly different from my own, this book felt embracing rather than alienating, perhaps due to the author's own removal from that place and time as she retrospects upon it. I really appreciated the complications she provided to any clean narrative of her childhood, while also indisputably inserting her own understanding today from a less fuzzy perspective.