Neotenica

A slippery novel set in the Bay Area of the early aughts, where femininity, race, and class tangle together. Winner of the 2021 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Fiction Finalist for the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction Neotenica is a novel of encounters: casual sex, arranged-marriage dates, cops, rowdy teenagers, lawyers, a Sapphic flirtation, a rival, a child, and two important dogs. At the center of it are Young Ae, a Korean-born ballet dancer turned PhD student, and her husband, a Korean-American male who inhabits an interior femininity, neither transgender nor homosexual, but a strong, visceral femininity nonetheless. This novel is an adrenaline filled ride sliding across the surface of desire and chance through the quotidian turned playful.