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by Aisling Rawle
Lily—a bored, beautiful twenty-something—wakes up on a remote desert compound, alongside nineteen other contestants competing on a massively popular reality show. To win, she must outlast her housemates to stay in the Compound the longest, while competing in challenges for luxury rewards like champagne and lipstick, plus communal necessities to outfit their new home, like food, appliances, and a front door.
Cameras are catching all her angles, good and bad, but Lily has no desire to leave: why would she, when the world outside is falling apart? As the competition intensifies, intimacy between the players deepens, and it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between desire and desperation. When the unseen producers raise the stakes, forcing contestants into upsetting, even dangerous situations, the line between playing the game and surviving it begins to blur. If Lily makes it to the end, she'll receive prizes beyond her wildest dreams—but what will she have to do to win?
Addictive and prescient, The Compound is an explosive debut from a major new voice in fiction and will linger in your mind long after the game ends.
Apathetic twentysomething Lily is beautiful but otherwise unremarkable, as she will be the first to tell you. She's bored with her job and doesn't get along with her mom, who she lives with, and she doesn't have any talents or ambitions. She doesn't have to think twice about applying to get on the show—a popular reality television series that blends elements of Love Island and Survivor. Lily and nineteen other contestants find themselves living in a remote desert compound, where they have to work together to compete for prizes—some of them luxuries, some of them necessities, like food and furniture to outfit their home. All the women must sleep next to a male contestant and vice versa, and if a contestant fails to pair up, they will be banished from the compound.
Cameras are watching at all times, capturing every moment of the day, and this footage will be edited down to episodes that are aired daily, but Lily forgets about this almost immediately. These cameras aren't manned by a production crew—the contestants are entirely isolated and left to their own devices, with minimal rules about how they need to conduct themselves. The most critical rule is that they are not allowed to discuss their lives outside of the show, or an unspecified punishment will be administered. Contestants quickly learn a new way of conversing, where they don't talk about anything of consequence, they simply trade inane observations, which after only a few days starts to feel freeing rather than stifling to Lily and the others.
The novel takes place entirely within the compound, starting when Lily wakes up on her first day on the show, and we know very little about her personal life. We eventually learn what the contestants do for work in the outside world, but we don't know where they live, what their hobbies are, whether or not they have siblings. When details from outside slip in, there's a vaguely dystopian air to them—"the wars" are mentioned, climate disasters are hinted at, and there's an overwhelming sense of nihilism in the way that Lily thinks about her previous life compared to life in the compound, which she's willing to do anything to hold onto. To Lily and the other contestants, the outside world feels like it falls away entirely as the compound becomes their new reality.
"I tried to imagine what it would be like to go home. The endless talk of the wars, and the masks that we wore in the cities and big towns, and the dreary gray skies, and evenings in front of the television. [...] What did it matter to wake up at the same time every morning and wear the same clothes and try to eat more protein but less sugar, when an earthquake or tsunami or a bomb might end it all at any minute? Or maybe we would all continue to boil, slowly but surely, in the mess that we pretended was an acceptable place to live."
Fusing an addicting page-turner of a narrative with a potent social commentary, debut author Aisling Rawle elevates a simple reality dating TV show premise into an unforgettable literary achievement. Contestants are subjected to heartbreak and humiliation in the name of entertainment for the unseen audience, which they submit themselves to willingly for the vague promise of a better life—the grand prize is really just more of the same; the winning contestant is allowed to continue to live in the compound for as long as they want, where they are granted all the luxuries they ask for. For Lily, an infinity of mindless consumerism is the only ambition she can dream up. For the reader, it's unsettling to confront the fact that Lily's existence in the compound may not be so different from our own under late-stage capitalism.
Therein lies the strength of The Compound—the expert way in which Rawle conceals dark truths about our present society and human nature under the gossipy veneer of reality TV drama.
Book reviewed by Rachel Hullett
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Aisling Rawle's debut novel The Compound takes place on an unnamed reality competition television show, where contestants live together, compete in challenges to earn rewards, and gradually get banished until only one remains to win the grand prize. As it borrows recognizable elements from popular reality shows like Survivor and Love Island, The Compound feels almost like turning on the TV on a Friday night to binge the latest Netflix series. But it's hardly the first novel to utilize the backdrop of reality television—a premise that has been explored through a variety of genres, from literary fiction to thrillers to romance to science fiction.
The Favorite Sister by Jessica Knoll follows two sisters who have long had a competitive relationship. The younger sister, Brett, has become a success, her life being filmed and aired on the reality show Goal Diggers, but when older sister Kelly infiltrates the show, she threatens to expose a secret that could ruin Brett.
Anita Kelly's romance novel Love & Other Disasters follows the first openly nonbinary contestant on popular reality cooking show Chef's Special, London, who falls for their competitor, the recently divorced Dahlia. Shenanigans ensue, but as the finale draws closer, London and Dahlia have to ask themselves whether their relationship can withstand the heat of the competition.
The Villain Edit by Laurie Devore follows romance novelist Jacqueline Matthis, whose floundering career leads to a comeback plan which involves appearing on the biggest dating show in the country, the 1. In the style of The Bachelor, the 1 features a group of women all vying for the affections of a single man, Marcus. But when Jac realizes her last one-night stand, Henry, is one of the show's producers, they begin to have an affair, which she knows will complicate her chances with Marcus if it comes to light.
In The Book of Essie by Meghan Maclean Weir, Essie Hicks is the youngest child on the wildly popular reality show Six for Hicks, which chronicles the lives of Essie's evangelical family. Essie, who has grown up in the spotlight, becomes pregnant, and her horrified parents consult the producers, who discuss how best to handle Essie's pregnancy in a way that will grow their ratings.
The Last One by Alexandra Oliva is a post-apocalyptic dystopian science fiction thriller in which twelve contestants are sent into the wilderness to survive. When a global disaster occurs, contestants don't know how much of it is real and how much is part of the game. One contestant referred to as Zoo by the producers must struggle through the wilderness to survive and win, even as the world she left behind to join the competition no longer exists.
Chain Gang All Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah takes place within the prison industrial complex, as inmates take part in CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment. In this highly controversial program, prisoners compete in gladiator-style combat against one another in order to secure their freedom.
Though this array of titles is diverse both in genre and subject matter, all grapple with a similar question raised by Aisling Rawle in The Compound: how do we draw the line between reality and fiction when we consume reality for entertainment?
by Nell Stevens
Brought to her uncle's decaying Oxfordshire estate when she was a child, Grace has grown up on the periphery of a once-great household, an outsider in her own home. Now a self-possessed and secretive young woman, she has developed unusual predilections: for painting, particularly forgery; for deception; for other girls.
As Grace cultivates her talent as a copyist, she realizes that her uncanny ability to recreate paintings might offer her a means of escape. Secretly, she puts this skill to use as an art forger, creating fake masterpieces in candlelit corners of the estate. Saving the money she makes from her sales, she plans a new life far from the family that has never seemed to want her.
Then, a letter arrives from the South Atlantic. The writer claims to be her cousin Charles, long presumed dead at sea, who wishes to reconnect with his family. When Charles returns, Grace's aunt welcomes him with open arms; yet fractures appear in the household. Some believe he is who he says he is. Others are convinced he's an impostor. As a court date looms to determine his legitimacy—and his claim to the family fortune—Grace must decide what she believes, and what she's willing to risk.
Is Charles really her cousin? An interloper? A mirror of her own ambitions? And in a house built on illusions, what does authenticity truly mean—in art, in love, and in family?
Deftly plotted and shimmering with Nell Stevens's distinctive intelligence, style, and wit, The Original takes readers on an unforgettable adventure through a world of forgeries, family ties, and the fluctuations in fortune that can change our fate.
Money has always been bound up with marriage, for reasons of lineage and inheritance and more. The two concepts can become conflated, mirror one another, can each make the need for the other disappear. Marriage for money may seem crude or opportunistic, but marriage for love to someone who has money is a magic trick. It makes the need to think about money, and the associated crudeness, vanish. It can be a trick well or badly done. It's been done in fiction by Jane Austen and writers of modern rom-coms. Heterosexuality, or the appearance of it, can help. Monogamy, or the appearance of it, can also help. Crime, as we see in Nell Stevens' The Original, a drama beginning in 19th-century England, could be essential to overcoming the need for this trick in the first place.
In her aunt's country house, where she has lived since her parents were both sent to asylums, Grace Inderwick constantly thinks about escaping a world of dependence and tedious expectations. A queer, socially awkward woman with no immediate family to protect her, Grace has little power she can exercise in her aunt's household or out in the world, but she does have the advantage of a limited photographic memory and a knack for painting—or rather, copying paintings—nurtured in childhood by her cousin Charles. This is offset by a face blindness that prevents her from being able to recognize people, let alone paint them from scratch. The paintings she copies are existing currency, and copying them is, for her, a way of existing in a world that she otherwise lacks the ability to mimic or integrate herself into. Replicating the paintings allows her to make her own currency. And currency, by its very nature, is replication, so is what she's doing even really wrong? Stevens aptly explores this question and much more in a text full of suspense and shadows that is still sunnier in disposition than one might expect.
Events are set in motion by a man who claims to be Grace's cousin years after Charles was presumed lost at sea. Grace is not sure whether she believes this "Charles" is really her cousin, and isn't sure whether her aunt, Charles's mother, believes it either. But the question matters, urgently, because "Charles" is set to inherit the Inderwick family fortune, unless he's determined to be an imposter, in which case, Grace eventually discovers, the money will come to her as next heir. To complicate matters, "Charles" seems intent on interfering in Grace's life while remaining inscrutable to her. She suspects him of stealing the money she makes from selling her first forgery. He also appears to be aware of her sexual involvement with a woman, but seems unfazed by this. At one point he asks her to marry him. His motivations are easy to guess at but hard to pin down.
The Original will especially appeal to readers who enjoy character-driven suspense, but it has something for almost everyone. Not quite a romance and not quite a crime thriller, it hits familiar genre beats while staying true to its own charming, off-kilter vision. Stevens maintains interpersonal tension in a clever, lighthearted way that renders no turn of events too serious, but also portrays her protagonist's situation with gravity, making the reader invested in her problems. Grace has knowledge of her sexuality and a realistic understanding of her options; this isn't a coming-of-age plot of fraught, unbearable moments but more of a social drama running alongside a mystery that comes to a clear resolution. Philosophical substance sustains its structure.
Get married or find freedom in work. As much as many women today have escaped the singular edict "get married," this dichotomy still feels ever-present and inescapable—for anyone, really, who isn't born into money, regardless of gender. Working or scheming, either for wealth or love, are still the ways popular culture lets us imagine we can be free, and this is reflected in the fact that you can scarcely hope to find a television series, contemporary or historical, that doesn't in some way revolve around crime, romance, or someone's job. The Original suggests that however much we may be rooting for Grace in her undertakings, work and scheming can be all-consuming, making any freedom gained by it feel invalid. It shows us this true thing about money, and then it shows us something else. From a certain perspective, Stevens' novel could be seen to resolve in a predictable, too-perfect way, but from another, it performs a double trick, making both marriage and money disappear, or at least mutate into something else.
In the meantime, it immerses the reader not only in Grace's predicaments but her pleasures, including the art world. Real-life paintings such as Courbet's Le Sommeil and Jan van Eyck's Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and His Wife (see Beyond the Book) make an appearance, as does a hauntingly evoked fictional work called The Drag depicting an ancestor of Grace's who, deceived by her husband, cursed all the men of the family. Maybe this woman, described as generous and resourceful, as Grace also is—knew of some greater freedom; maybe Grace, the reader hopes, will know something of that freedom too.
Book reviewed by Elisabeth Cook
In The Original by Nell Stevens, Grace Inderwick, who lives a privileged but dreary existence with her aunt in England at the turn of the 20th century, dreams of making an independent life for herself as an art forger. In her endeavors to do so, one of the paintings she copies is Jan van Eyck's Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and His Wife (1434). She views the work at the National Gallery before beginning her project, and finds it deeply affecting.
The painting is known for its photographic precision, as well as the mystery of the story behind it. The exact details of the portrait and what it depicts, in contrast to its sharply rendered visuals, are ambiguous. Is the man, purported to be Italian merchant Giovanni Arnolfini, really Arnolfini? A mirror hangs on the wall, and in it, rather than what would have been a true reflection of the artist at work, we see two figures entering the room. Grace observes, "the impression given by the scene in the mirror was of an interruption, of something that has not yet happened just beginning to happen, and the artist invisible, vanished from sight, like a copyist." What other details of the image might be fictionalized? Is the woman in the painting Arnolfini's wife? His fiancée? Is she pregnant, or is that just the way she's holding her gown? "[I]t seemed that she must be," Grace thinks, "and the more I looked the surer I felt, not convinced by the shape of her body so much as by her eyes, which looked past her husband rather than at him, and seemed so tired and wise that I could not believe there was anything she was ignorant about."
But who's to say, really? In a Guardian article, comedian Hannah Gadsby quips, "Not only did Van Eyck have a habit of painting women to look like they were with child even when they were without, but it was also fashionable at the time to look pregnant when you were not. Faking the harvest to attract the seed, so to speak."
Gadsby goes on to lambast art historian Erwin Panofsky's famous analysis of the Arnolfini portrait, in which he argued that the painting was not just a work of art but a legal document witnessing the marriage of Arnolfini and his wife Giovanna Cenami. But an actual legal document was later found that showed the couple's marriage took place in 1447, long after the portrait was painted and Van Eyck had died. "A man of his time," Gadsby writes of Panofsky, "he approached art from a fixed perspective – one that was only ever accessible to the white European elite of the male variety. To assume that a work of art has singular meaning is as arrogant as assuming that every person experiences the world in the same way as you."
At the time of viewing the painting, Grace has announced that she will marry a man who may be her cousin Charles, or who may be an imposter claiming to be Charles to inherit the family money. She feels pressured into this arrangement and desires freedom from it, in part because she is attracted to women and not to men; the man claiming to be Charles knows of her involvement with a woman but she is unclear on his expectations of their marriage. The Arnolfini portrait, therefore, in its portrayal of what appears to be a man and a woman who are at some stage of a traditional engagement or marriage but retain a mysterious aura, may seem to Grace to hold some hidden knowledge of heterosexual partnership, or of the possibilities that could lurk beneath the facade of it.
Jan van Eyck's Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and His Wife (1434), courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
by Susan Choi
One night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the beach. He's carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later Louisa is found washed up by the tide, barely alive. Her father is gone. She is ten years old.
In chapters that shift from one member to the next, turning back again and again to that night by the sea, Susan Choi's Flashlight chases the shockwaves of one family's catastrophe. Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past. Her father, Serk, an ethnic Korean born and raised in Japan, lost touch with his family when they bought into the promises of postwar Pyongyang and relocated to the DPRK. Her American mother, Anne, is estranged from her family after a reckless adventure in her youth. And then there is Tobias, Anne's illegitimate son, whose reappearance in their lives will have astonishing consequences.
What really happened to Louisa's father? Why did he take Louisa and her mother to Japan just before he disappeared? And how can we love, or make sense of our lives, when there's so much we can't see?
In Susan Choi's Flashlight, ten-year-old Louisa, the daughter of a Japanese-born Korean man and a white woman from the American Midwest, is found unconscious on a beach in Japan—her father, who was walking with her through the dark, flashlight in hand, is soon presumed drowned. That's the end of the story as far as anyone seems concerned. But this event, with its unknowns, reverberates forward, through the lives of Louisa and her mother Anne, both perceptibly and imperceptibly, linked to the past in ways they can't imagine.
Choi's novel is about the general impact of family secrets and trauma, and also specifically about Korean history and Korean culture loss (see Beyond the Book). Louisa's father, referred to in flashbacks to his childhood in Japan as Seok—alternated with Hiroshi, the Japanese name given to him during the occupation—and later as Serk starting with his time in the United States, never speaks of his Korean family to his American one, because his parents and siblings, save for a sister still in Japan he keeps in sporadic contact with, voluntarily relocated to North Korea. Their fates are uncertain, and Serk, without American citizenship, doesn't want to risk his residence by betraying ties to the DPRK. His assimilation into first Japanese and then American society, his silence, the languages he speaks and doesn't speak—these aren't accidents or choices, they're cultural erasure, colonialism and imperialism at work.
Despite its premise, Flashlight is less suspense-driven than a reader might expect, and more closely resembles straightforward literary fiction than Choi's National Book Award-winning Trust Exercise (2019). But it's a big swing with bold implications. Choi is relentless in her depiction of the necessarily violent consequences of borders, not just when it comes to the more obvious examples, like the complicity of global powers in North Koreans' isolation, but in less expected ways, such as when Louisa, traveling through Europe during college, runs into a barrage of bad luck and bureaucracy that affects the trajectory of her future. This violence is contrasted with the mundanity of life lived for long stretches without the direct interference of governments, militaries, and force, and realistic portrayals of how easy it can be to ignore the invisible atmosphere of assumptions we breathe, political and otherwise. Choi's descriptions of the fallibility of the human mind and memory are luminous:
"These are not the events Louisa recalls because she has never recalled them, they live nowhere in memory. If she was somehow aware of these events that she isn't aware of, she might wonder if the events, housed nowhere in her memory, buried in some unremembering stratum of her body or perhaps expelled like noxious vapors into the impersonal air, can even be said to have happened. … The story of her father's death by drowning is one she somehow both authored and received passively. It emerged in response to a logic and it equally dictated logic."
The book's more than four hundred pages hold many detours and deep dives into characters' individual stories. Flashlight amply displays Choi's stellar writing through a variety of moods and subjects, though it lacks a dynamism that could have been achieved through greater intentionality. The plot is also somewhat predictable, but destabilizingly refreshing in the precise manner of its unfolding, invigorating in its combination of drama and matter-of-factness. The seemingly central mystery is revealed, with little fanfare, in the second half, and the suspense subsequently flows into anticipation of the future. This switching of streams reflects how cultural and historical losses run below the surface of families and nations, below the normalizing, distracting narratives attached to them. We follow the story waiting to discover what happened to Serk, thinking of both the obvious and less obvious answers, waiting for a clever or unexpected turn, only to find that maybe we knew what happened to him all along and the real question has been what will happen now.
It's easy to read Choi's writing of Serk as heavyhanded, and some readers will probably feel the specifics of his life and fate are a bit much. It can appear like this unfortunate man carries all the weight of the Japanese occupation and the Korean War on his back, like he is an unlucky vessel filled with history, a human microcosm of a stolen and broken land. But even if he exemplifies this history, he is also a victim and actor in it, someone who has had intimate contact with it, not a metaphor or an analogy but a part of the whole, and luck may have less to do with everything than one might think. And after all, what is a realistic life? What does it mean to have lived one that seems unrealistic to others? Whose story is believed or not, and why?
If Choi's novel is about the violence and rigidity of borders, how they enforce one story as multiple stories teem around them, it's also about how rigid lines might blur and fade into one another, how borders and barriers become mutable when they encounter elements that can never be fully controlled—water, air, language. Flashlight will appeal to book clubs for discussion and to readers who like big, sprawling works of literary and historical fiction that weave global events with personal minutiae. It is mercilessly sad and dramatic, but in the way of tragedies that satisfy with the breadth of their emotion and stories that pull all their threads together at the last minute for a happy ending of sorts. It offers a world to get lost in and a deep historical consciousness.
Book reviewed by Elisabeth Cook
In Susan Choi's Flashlight, main character Seok, later referred to as Serk, spends his childhood with his Korean family in Japan during the Japanese occupation of Korea. He attends a Japanese school, where he speaks and learns to write Japanese. He believes he is Japanese until the occupation ends, leading to a humorous and emotionally brutal exchange with his family that is illustrative of what Korean people, at home and abroad, lost during this period of enforced Japanese language and schooling:
"But what's Korea?" he asked as they turned to walk home.
"Let me die," Auntie Kim said.
"Korea is the homeland of Koreans," his mother told him.
"But what are Koreans?"
"We are," said his mother. "You are. That's why your name isn't really Hiroshi, it's 석."
"What do you mean my name isn't Hiroshi?" he cried.
"I told you," Auntie Kim said to his mother again.
His mother replied, "But what choice did we have?"
During Japan's occupation of Korea (1910-1945), Japan assumed military control of the Korean peninsula and its institutions, including schools, and used education as a means of assimilating Koreans to Japanese language and culture. Widespread displacement and enforced immigration also resulted in many Koreans, like Seok's family on Jeju Island, being relocated to Japan. While the war waged on Korean life and identity was wide-ranging, the attempted erasure of the Korean language, including the suppression of hangul, the Korean writing system, was arguably one of the most significant elements. And although the occupation ended in 1945, Korean people who grew up or lived during Japanese rule continued to experience profound effects of this language loss that in some cases still impact later generations.
As a child, Seok understands Korean from hearing his parents speak it, but he rarely speaks it himself and has never learned the written language. Later, after moving to the United States and marrying an American woman, he spends time with a Korean colleague, Tom. Serk's wife, Anne, portrays her husband's attitude towards the language in a letter to a friend: "Serk even claims, at times, that he CAN'T speak Korean—he and Tom quarreled about this—in Korean, I can only assume!" Later, when Serk's adult daughter Louisa is learning to speak Korean, she thinks of it as "the language her father apparently discarded to the back of his linguistic closet before she was ever his child, a language he possessed in its totality and never bothered to use."
Fluency and degrees of fluency in a language can be nuanced even when one's relationship to it isn't complicated by personal and emotional factors, and Serk's downplaying of his Korean background in general has been bound up with not wanting to endanger his residence in the US by calling attention to his family's ties with North Korea. In this way, the suppression of the Korean language, for Serk, continues long after the Japanese occupation for reasons related to global interests and geopolitical power, even as those around him remain unaware of this.
In Beyond the Shadow of Camptown, an account of Korean military brides in America, Ji-Yeon Yuh addresses the effects language and power had on women who lived through the Japanese colonial period and later moved to the US, many of whom made life choices in precarious situations. Learning first Japanese and then English was essential to their economic prospects during the periods of respective dominance of Japan and America. They had also been discouraged from speaking Korean or never fully learned it, leaving them to struggle with the language later on:
"Foreign domination had literally left these women with no language to call their own. Far from being a liberating, transnational, and multicultural experience that allowed them to cross borders at will and revel in the interplay of multiple tongues, their contacts with multiple languages had been painful, frustrating, and even humiliating."
Both Serk's situation and that of the military brides call attention to the varied, complicated, and sometimes permanent ways that the Japanese occupation (along with subsequent American military presence in South Korea) changed many Korean people's relationship to their language, and how it has presented obstacles to speakers in the Korean diaspora passing the language on to their descendants.
Replica of Hunmin Jeongeum Haerye, the book in which the creation of hangul is explained, at the National Museum of Korea in Seoul, photo by Kbarends
by Benedict Nguyen
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 title of Hot Girls with Balls is clearly meant to grab the reader's attention and inspire questions about the meaning of its double (triple?) entendre. It refers to the protagonists, two Asian trans women who are adored stars of a male professional volleyball league. In the universe of the novel, posited as a satirical parallel to our own, pro volleyball emerged as a popular sport around the time the "COVIS" pandemic first hit the world, and its rise in popularity is due in large part to these two incredible athletes, who are also savvy cultivators of their personal brands. It is this latter feature—rather than sports and athleticism, rather than trans life—that takes center stage in the novel, as the women experience the pitfalls of fame.
When we are introduced to Six and Green, they have just completed a broadcast on "Instagraph Live" streamed by 35,000 of their biggest fans. Since both are professional athletes, their relationship is usually a long distance one, but they come together shortly after the novel begins to compete against one another at the Sonus Volleyball Tournament. The joy of their reunion is marred by a hate crime: the murders of three Asian trans women in Alpharetta, Georgia. Both Six and Green are distraught when they hear the news, but Green especially feels spurred to do something to help her community. The weight of these conflicting priorities—fame, love, political action—drives the story forward as Six and Green prepare to compete.
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.
Unfortunately, the plot doesn't entirely come together into a cohesive whole, in part because of the pacing that propels the reader through hastily constructed backstory and forward through incident after incident. There is very little time for quiet reflection with the protagonists—the kind that builds depth and development, and connection with the reader. It often feels like too many things are happening—the storyline about the murders of the Asian trans women is more or less subsumed in the end by another misfortune that befalls Six and Green during their tournament. Most likely this is partly the author's point. Fame creates circumstances that prevent the famous person from behaving and experiencing life like a civilian; being constantly monitored and commented upon leaves someone very little room to appropriately work through grief, or other feelings.
Nguyễn is adept at capturing the mind-numbingly dull aspects of fame, through pages of comments on Six and Green's social media pages, descriptions of their posting regimens, and petty jealousies: "After [filming a dance video] was an action shot accompanied by her usual caption contest. Yemma's team sent Green the top ten, and Green reposted her five favorites. Once, Green complained to Yemma how Six didn't have to work as hard to boost her own engagement. Yemma gave her such a pitying look, she never complained about it again." 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. Its commentary on fame, sports, and gender is very smart and often very funny. The imaginative powers Nguyễn displays in crafting this oddball universe suggest great things to come.
Book reviewed by Lisa Butts
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 girls in athletics was as widespread and significant as detractors suggest, research demonstrates that they have no real competitive advantage over their cis counterparts, and may in fact be disadvantaged in some key ways. A study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that cis women have greater lower body strength and lung function than trans women, and that trans and cis women have roughly the same levels of testosterone and hemoglobin (a protein that carries oxygen from the lungs to the muscles).
Trans women athletes have been competing with cis women for decades if not centuries. One of the first well-known trans women athletes was Renée Richards, who played professional tennis and competed at the 1977 US Open. Richards was initially denied entry into the competition because she refused to take the required "gender verification test"—she sued and the New York State Supreme Court ruled in her favor, declaring the test "grossly unfair, discriminatory and inequitable, and a violation of her rights." She and her doubles partner, Betty Ann Stuart, made it to the finals, but lost to Martina Navratilova and Betty Stove.
As trans rights become more entrenched and normalized in society (even if still under threat) and trans people feel safer coming out and pursuing their goals, openly trans athletes have become more common, though intolerance and bigotry persist.
In 2020, a trans weightlifter named Laurel Hubbard competed for New Zealand at the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. Though she did not medal at that competition, she did earn silver in two events at the 2017 World Championships.
In 2022, Lia Thomas became the first trans woman athlete to win an NCAA swimming competition when she came in first in the 500-yard freestyle event at the NCAA Division I Swimming and Diving Championships, competing for University of Pennsylvania. It was a lightning rod moment that attracted hand-wringing from transphobic critics (including a University of Kentucky swimmer who tied for fifth with Thomas in the 200-meter freestyle event and has since made herself famous spewing transphobic vitriol at children). Penn stood by its athlete and nominated Thomas for NCAA "Woman of the Year." Her swimming career was sidelined by the decision of World Aquatics (the international governing body for competitive swimming) to disqualify trans swimmers who had not transitioned before age 12. Thomas has gone on to pursue a career in law and has been a tireless advocate for trans rights.
Though the US does not have any out trans women playing professional volleyball like those in Hot Girls with Balls at the time of publication of this article, Tiffany Abreu plays competitively in Brazil for Osasco. The team recently won the 2025 Superliga title—the top volleyball championship tournament in Brazil. It was the first tournament win for Osasco since 2012.
Trans people have always played sports. In Michael Waters' book The Other Olympians, he details the lives and careers of Zdeněk Koubek and Mark Weston, who both became world-famous athletes in the 1930s after they came out as trans men, inspiring both interest and appreciation in the general public. Waters connects the rise of the Nazis to power with the regressive policies around gender and sexuality that have continued to plague sports into the present day.
Illustration of Tiffany Abreu, Brazilian volleyball player
Created by Larcinha, CC BY-SA 4.0
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