The In-Between Bookstore, by Edward Underhill

[rachelmanija]

Darby, a transmasc guy from a small town in Illinois, has been living in NYC for ten years, since he turned eighteen. He's acquired queer/trans friend group, but just got fired and is about to lose his apartment. He decides to temporarily move back in with his mom in Illinois. But things have changed in his town. Michael, his old bestie/crush, who he had a terrible breakup with ten years ago, has come out as gay. And the old bookstore Darby used to work at is still there... and his pre-transition teenage self is still working there.

Isn't that a great premise? The central conceit of meeting your own younger self when you return to the town you grew up in is such a perfect metaphor, made even more powerful by the split between pre- and post-transition.

Unfortunately, most of the book is not actually about that. It's mostly about Darby just kind of hanging around and feeling repetitively guilty about having been totally out of touch with his extremely supportive mom, and crushing on Michael while they both either fail to or refuse to actually communicate about either their present feelings or what went down between them as teenagers. (Darby literally can't even remember what their fight was about, but when he tells Michael this, Michael gets mad and stomps off without telling him.) When Darby finally does actually talk to his teenage self, he's mostly interested in trying to stop his teenage self from getting in that fight with teenage Michael.

This would be kind of okay if the book was a romance, where things are centered around the romantic relationship, but it isn't. It's a coming of age story, but it's only in the last two chapters that any actual character growth happens. Up until that point, Darby is kind of maddening. He's 28 but acts at least eight years younger. That's the point - he's a case of arrested development - but it was so annoying to read. It doesn't help that Michael acts way more mature than Darby except when it's necessary to keep them from communicating about anything important, and then he just refuses to talk like an adult.

I found this book frustrating. The author is obviously talented but the book needed at least another draft. Also, the bookstore itself isn't important, it's just the place where young Darby works.

To my total lack of surprise, the big breakup was a big misunderstanding. Michael thought Darby knew he was gay and was being homophobic, but Darby had no idea and meant something else entirely, and then they never talked about it. In the present, Darby realizes that he doesn't communicate enough, resolves to fix that when he returns to NYC, and invites Michael to go back with him without ever telling Michael about the time travel that made him realize that. Michael says nope, they break up again but more amicably, and Darby goes back to New York. So most of the action of the book was a dead end.

The one part of the book that I really liked happened in the last two chapters, when Darby FINALLY does something with his teenage self that's actually about his teenage self. He orders a book on trans history, then gives it to teenage Darby. This doesn't change anything in the present, but Darby speculates that there are many timelines, and in the Teen Darby Meets Adult Darby timeline, that changed things.



I feel like I'm saying this a lot recently, but this book would have been so much better if the entire book had been about the supposed premise which in fact only got about 10% of the total page time.

Comments

[edenfalling]

That sounds incredibly frustrating to read.

[rachelmanija]

It was SO FRUSTRATING.

[lokifan]

Absolutely maddening!

[pauraque]

I can't comment on how it's handled in the book, but my first thought is that I know a lot of trans readers who would run screaming from the premise of meeting one's pre-transition self. I realize the author is trans, and not everyone would find the concept dysphoric, it's just the first place my mind went.

[rachelmanija]

For sure! To me the two obvious places that premise goes are 1) run screaming, 2) try to help out your younger self. Darby instead goes for 3) try to get your younger self to not alienate your crush in the past. He doesn't have any strong emotion about his younger self other than "this can't be happening," and doesn't get around to 2) until almost the end of the book.

[sovay]

He orders a book on trans history, then gives it to teenage Darby. This doesn't change anything in the present, but Darby speculates that there are many timelines, and in the Teen Darby Meets Adult Darby timeline, that changed things.

Look away, people who care about spoilers for William Gibson's The Peripheral (2014): my favorite character in that novel turns out to have had a similar experience of being visited by their post-transition self from an alternate future; it is not a major point of the story which depends heavily on interference in/contact between the timelines, but it's a major point of their identity, and in a plot where it wouldn't make all that much difference if they were cis—it's more important that they exist on both sides of the event that altered our near future into their alternate path—I happen to like that they are not.

[sushiflop]

It's always frustrating when you can see how good something COULD have been...

[thomasyan]

Sounds frustrating, and the time travel / old-self aspect confused me.

> temporarily move back in with his mom

At first I wondered if that was both temporarily and temporally, but I guess everything is normal time-wise except at the in-between bookstore?

[rachelmanija]

The time-travel is under-explained and under-developed. It only occurs at the bookstore, but only at random, and at random lengths of time at the bookstore. Sometimes the bookstore is in the present.

[el_staplador]

Argh! "Character meets younger self" is one of my favourite premises, but only if paired with "and they both help each other figure something out about themselves". This book sounds like such a waste!

[la_marquise]

I wonder if it's available over here? I shall look: it sounds interesting.

[hilarita]

This is a great public service book review, so that I can steer clear. It sounds so near and yet so far from being a satisfactory book whether its alleged genre was fantasy coming-of-age or romance. Genre mash-ups can be very successful, but you have to commit to the bit, and this sounds like it sort of hung around near the bit and decided that engaging with it was a bit too decisive.

[rachelmanija]

Yes, that was basically my issue with it. The majority of the book feels like a romance - once Darby gets back to his hometown, his big concern is Michael - but it ends with them breaking up permanently. The secondary story is Darby coming of age, but his personal growth is uhhh not a lot and mostly happens in the last couple chapters. The time travel, which is what I was most interested in, is basically a C plot.

[movingfinger]

I've read several books like this recently with a kind of pasted-on magical-shop thing, and I have to wonder whether there is not some workshop somewhere that people are attending, or an article they're reading or something. Because this has to be the sixth or seventh in the past half-year. Some of the books I've read have been in translation but all have been very recent (past two-three years for the translations). None of them have made very good use, IMO, of the magic-shop element, or explored it; it's only serving a larger melodrama (Until the Coffee Gets Cold, I am side-eyeing you so hard).

There is a long lineage of magical-shop stories, and of course very few come with explanations, but these recent works all have a very similar blandness and a similar lack of real depth.

[rachelmanija]

Can you tell me what the others were so I can avoid them?