My favorite thing about this YA/New Adult novel is how meta it is. An I-think-cisgender-but-I-can’t-remember-why-I-think-so-or-did-I-just-assume-this? author writing about a transgender character and a cisgender character who is telling people she is transgender. I loved Gold’s previous novel Being Emily, and the main characters Emily and Claire appear in this book... and they have written a memoir called Being Emily. It’s Emily-ception, my head is exploding!

So this story takes place at a college in Ohio and has two main characters: Ella, a geeky, femme, rich gamer/science girl who is transgender and bi/questioning, and Tucker, a feisty, lefty, working-class butch Humanities girl who is cisgender and an out lesbian. Because she has kind of a hero complex, Tucker decides to defend/protect the unknown trans girl in her dorm by saying she Tucker is that girl, and then she becomes the target of a lot of transphobic abuse on campus. In this way the author sidesteps the seemingly-obligatory violence-against-trans-teen scene by making it happen to someone else. (I say seemingly-obligatory because it’s very very common in YA with transgender characters, and I get why that is, but it harshes my mellow, and any change is as good as a holiday.) It’s certainly a way out I would never have thought of in a hundred years. However, the burden has just shifted over to poor Tucker. TW for violence, dating violence and sexual assault.

Anyway, Tucker and Ella become friends, then roommates, then closer friends, and then some sparks fly between them... but the romantic element of this book is a lot more complicated and realistic than this partial synopsis suggests, which is part of the awesomeness. Actually the romance/love triangle element reminded me of Adaptation by Malinda Lo. And there’s a part where Ella and Tucker and their friends use gaming for activism, which reminded me of Cory Doctorow. Since I love Malinda Lo and Cory Doctorow, this is some pretty high praise. But speaking of the romantic element, it gets pretty spicy, in a good way, but that plus the college milieu makes it more NA than YA, and not something that most people would feel comfortable having their grandmother read over their shoulder.

I’m going to get a bit more spoiler-y here. There are a lot of things in this book that were potential hazards but were very delicately and tastefully handled. And then a few other places in the book where I could pick it apart and complain about why did the author use this word or that word. But you know what, that’s the easiest kind of book review to write, and kind of boring, and I’m sure someone else out there has got it covered. The one thing that I did want to mention that seemed a little facile to me was that after one of the characters is raped, everyone universally urges her to report it to the campus authorities, and I definitely see two points of view about that. Then there’s a pretty swift and fair process of justice and the rapist ends up being expelled. That is so not how things happened in sexual assault cases at my university in the late nineties, and I’d like to think things have changed so much, but it’s kind of hard to believe. But I’m the one who doesn’t want uber-depressing books for QUILTBAG youth so why am I complaining?

Overall, despite the slew of bad things that happen in this book, there’s a real sense that everyone is basically “good people” and this is shown in a lot of ways. There are a lot of people who don’t know anything about transgender issues, and then they are educated, and then they are allies, as simple as that. Or there are a couple characters who are in conflict with our main characters, but then they realize they have common interests or it was all kind of a miscommunication. Two people who have both been abused by the same person have been pitted against each other in the past, but once they realize, they immediately help each other. Everyone is so nice except for a few baddies who are cartoonishly evil. (Honestly, I love characters like that; I know it’s not supposed to be good writing but I think that’s just a fad and evil characters are my favorite.) This “niceness” also manifests in a couple ways which seem more negative to me. There’s a neat character Nico who is genderqueer who is Ella’s friend, and when Ella’s new friends at the university meet Nico, they will not stop trying to find out what gender Nico was originally assigned. This is never revealed, which I thought was great. But, to me, the friends’ nonstop questioning was pretty horrible. But Nico doesn’t care. Actually all the characters are ready to educate anyone at any moment and they don’t mind being questioned. Then for the whole book I was waiting for someone to say to Tucker something like, I understand you mean well and you were trying to be noble, but it’s not cool to appropriate an identity that is not your own. This never ever happened. It was all, Thank you, Tucker, you’re so great. In general, I really really like it when my expectations for a novel are thwarted and the plot does not go the way I expected, and this happened bigtime here, so I take my hat off to Rachel Gold for all this. Finally I decided that this weird quality I couldn’t understand where everyone is so nice and eager to educate each other is because... they are from Ohio. People do NOT behave like this in downstate New York, no way no how. But maybe people are really like that in the Midwest?

Theme song for this book? I am going to have to come back to this later because I am really really drawing a blank.

Hmmmm.  How to describe the first chapter of this book.  Rachel has moved to St. Louis where she has started a new firm.  Her first client is, well, how shall we put this.  The case involves a will, an irate wife, fellatio, Big Macs with special sauce, Golden Showers, Visa statements, and the threat of photographs. It’s also very funny.

Although she has sworn never to take another divorce case, Rachel is persuaded by Anne, her sister, to help Eileen Landau. As she soon learns, Eileen is having an affair with Andros, a local fitness instructor, otherwise spelled g.i.g.o.l.o. When Andros turns up dead in a hotel room where he and Eileen were having a tryst and Eileen admits she skipped after watching him in the throes of being poisoned, Rachel knows she has a problem, especially since Eileen took along Andros’s briefcase that contained some rather explicit pictures of the two of them.  But it turns out that Rachel’s sister is also in a photo album kept by the dead man and she is charged with his murder.

Rachel’s investigation begins to turn up all sorts of complications.  Good mystery.  Light on the legal side.   Benny continues to amuse and delight.  To wit:  (pun intended)

<i>“Probably because normal people believe that a bowel movement is a private act,” I said.

Benny clicked off the flashlight and closed his book.

“And sex isn’t?”

“Yeah, but sex sells books.”

“I’m not just talking hot-sex junk fiction,” he said.

“I’m talking front page of the New York Times Book Review fiction. I’m talking Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, John Updike, Alice Hoffman. You’ve got people shtupping like crazy in those books. Blow jobs, hand jobs, rim jobs—you name it.”

I shrugged. “Maybe the authors think that a sexual encounter is a way to reveal something about a character’s personality.”

He gave me an astounded look. “And taking a dump isn’t?”</i>

I'm reading the entire series.

Excellent story. I am becoming a big fan of Michael Kahn and Rachel Gold. In this second of the series, Rachel is again hired by her old firm to represent one of their clients since they have a potential conflict of interest. The firm's St. Louis managing partner, Stoddard Anderson, committed suicide, his body having been found in a hotel near the airport following a four day period when he was completely missing.

There is a quirk in Missouri law that prevents an insurance company from not paying out a life insurance claim in case of suicide, but the insurance company need not pay an accidental death rider if the deceased was sane at the time of his death. If he was ruled insane, or not in his right mind, then the death could be ruled accidental so Rachel has the difficult task of deciding for the widow, her client, if Anderson was insane at the time when he slit his wrists. His firm certainly does not want the possibility that their managing partner was insane raised in the press. That might not go well with clients. The insurance policy had a triple indemnity rider in case of accidental death. “If he was insane at the time he committed suicide, then his death would be deemed an accident under Missouri law, and the carrier would have to pay an additional one-point-four million dollars in death benefits.” The case gets even more bizarre when Rachel discovers that Stoddard might have been instrumental in smuggling an ancient Mexican artifact worth millions.

I love Kahn’s cynical view of the law. Here’s his take on insurance law: “There are trial lawyers out there—thousands—who make their living litigating the meaning of terms in insurance policies. One of the mysteries of the law is the way that basic words—words as hard and precise as cut diamonds—become warm saltwater taffy when inserted at critical points in insurance policies. Because millions of dollars can hinge on a court's explication of one of the Four Horsemen of the Insuring Clause—“sudden,” “unexpected,” “occurrence,” and “loss”—entire law firms have been built on the legal fees paid by insurance companies, to say nothing of the cottage industry of legal publishers and law school professors that have been feasting at the insurance trough for years.”

Benny is a great character who adds a nice scatological and humorous touch, and Rachel has a wonderful no-nonsense view of things. The way she handles two guys in a Porsche who hit on her is priceless.

Interestingly, in each of the Rachel Gold books I have read so far, there is a code that Rachel must solve to get to the bottom of the mystery. My only complaint, and it’s a small one, is that there is more mystery than legal drama, but I quibble. Good series.

Rachel is hired by the managing partner of her old firm to find out who or what is "Canaan."  At issue is the execution the will of a recently deceased (he died in flagrante) partner in the firm who had added a bizarre codicil to his will two years earlier. This addition  provided for the maintenance of Canaan's grave, which happened to be in a pet cemetery, yet to the best of everyone's knowledge, he had never owned a pet.

Kahn has woven an intriguing plot related to a book written by someone who had attended Barrett College that purports to relate the story of a lottery in a town that ceased to exist.  The story flows well and keeps the pages turning.  My only quibble was Paul, Rachel’s erstwhile ex-boyfriend who happens along at a convenient time with a copy of the book (he was a Barrett graduate, also) even though his knowledge of it is explained adequately.  I had hoped for a more satisfactory ending that might have involved some legal shenanigans rather than a moray eel. But it's Kahn's first and the legal end becomes more pronounced in later volumes.

Much like another of Kahn’s stories, this one also has a code as its key. It was hard to believe this was the first book by Kahn.  Having read a couple out of order, I’m now going to read them all in the proper sequence.  In this book, Rachel is still in Chicago, Benny has just been hired to teach, but Ozzie is still a presence.

Having enjoyed Kahn's Trophy Widow, I poked around for some more Kahn books and downloaded this collection of three Rachel Gold stories. Nifty.

The first involves a clever scheme by a Holocaust survivor, Mendel Sofer, to mimic a Jewish Seder custom involving breaking of the matzah. The larger piece of bread is known as the Afikomen and this piece is hidden. The smaller piece, the Lahma Anya, is also known as the Bread of Affliction. (I have to admit having forgotten all this stuff, but then I've only been to one seder, that of my high school buddy.) After dinner the children search for the hidden Afikomen and the finder gets a reward.

I won't say any more except that Sofer decided to hide an important part of his will. Without that part there was a chance the money would revert to some very distant relatives who, it just so happened, also happened to be Aryan Nation anti-semites. So Rachel has to puzzle out where the rest of the will might have been hidden.

The other two stories are equally compelling. The middle story has a prosaic subject. It’s a lawsuit between a dress designer and a rich matron who first bought and then returned a dress claiming she didn't like it. Words were exchanged and she is now suing for defamation. Rachel’s trick to get her client off was nifty but it also revealed the truth. The third story involves DNA, sperm deposits, a 26-year old wife and her 76 year-old husband, a blood-line trust, and mad relatives. How could you not be compelled to read that?

No murders, car chases, stabbings, airplane crashes or aliens. Just interesting characters and realistic legal stories. I liked them. I’ve bought all of the Rachel Gold books for my Kindle.