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by Benedict Nguyen
Book Reviewed by:In this outrageous and deeply serious satire, two star indoor volleyball players juggle unspoken jealousies in their off-court romance ahead of their rival teams' first rematch in a year.
Six is 6'7", scheming to rejoin the starting lineup, and barely checks her phone. Green is 6'1", always building her brand, and secretly jealous of her more famous girlfriend. They're gutsy, gorgeous babes going where no Asian American trans woman has gone before: the men's pro indoor volleyball league. Six and Green are… hot girls with balls.
In between their rival teams' away games across the globe, they stay connected on SpaceTime and selflessly broadcast their romance with fans on their weekly Instagraph live show. After a long season, they'll finally reunite for the championship tournament, the first to accommodate in-person fans since the COVIS pandemic struck the world a year ago. Just as they enter an airtight bro bubble of the world's best, they're faced with a public crisis that demands an indisputably humiliating task: make a public statement online.
Can Green stock up enough clout for her post-ball future? Can Six girlboss her team's seniority politics? Can they both take a timeout to just grieve? Their rabid fans and horny haters await their next move. We're all just desperate for a whiff of the feminine sweaty energy that makes that ball thwack with such spectacular force.
The premise is remarkable: that two Asian American trans women of roughly the same age would have transitioned and developed a career in men's volleyball at roughly the same time, entirely independently of one another. Author Benedict Nguyễn makes a clever choice to remark on these circumstances very little. The reader is swept along through this world of coincidence like a fun improv game, required to "yes, and" each unlikely detail to keep up with the manic pace of the story...There is a great deal of commentary about how engaged famous people should feel obligated to be with politics and social justice issues. But what emerges as an even greater theme is how small a famous person's life can become. There isn't room for much that isn't volleyball, social media and other publicity commitments, and their own (lucrative) relationship. Everything larger simply falls away. Though it has its flaws, Hot Girls with Balls also has all the wild audacity you would expect from its title and premise. It is formally inventive (the big tournament pitting Six and Green against one another is narrated entirely by crowd and announcer commentary) and extremely fun...continued
Full Review
(687 words)
(Reviewed by Lisa Butts).
Chantal V. Johnson, author of Post-Traumatic
Hot Girls with Balls is a thrillingly cheeky, tenderly irreverent, seriously funny novel, anchored by a loving duo I couldn't stop rooting for and featuring a very spicy send-up of the comments section. No one is spared from Benedict Nguyễn's dishy satire, but with writing this alive, we wouldn't want it any other way. Jasmine Gibson, author of A Beauty Has Come
Hot Girls with Balls is a cheeky and daring presentation of women defining themselves for the love of the game. Nguyễn moves blithely through Six and Green's ability to balance their own bodily autonomy, the transphobic/fetish gaze, and the love and envy that can exist for these women creating themselves in the gender segregationist world of sports. Dear reader, consider yourself immersed in the world that is Hot Girls with Balls! Patrick Cottrell, author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace
I rarely come across a novel with the style, humor, and vitality of Hot Girls with Balls. It's a rigorous and gutting satire, a courageous social fantasy, a realistic portrait of the hell that is humanity, a deeply felt book about love and competition. Benedict Nguyễn is a star. I love the way she sees the world.
In Hot Girls with Balls, author Benedict Nguyễn chooses to depict her protagonists, two star athletes who happen to both be Asian trans women, as competitors in the professional men's volleyball league rather than the women's. This choice is a gesture toward the manufactured controversy surrounding trans women competing against cisgender women in sports that has become a lightning rod for those seeking to legitimize transphobic bigotry.
Trans women make up less than 0.002% of college athletes in the United States, and 0.001% of Olympic competitors. Experts estimate fewer than 100 trans girls across the US are competing in sports on girls' teams in K-12 schools. But more importantly, even if the presence of trans women and ...
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