Title: Transparent: Love, Family and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers
Author: Cris Beam
Publisher: Harcourt, Inc
Length: Novel, 323 pages
Buy the book: Powells

Blurb:

When Cris Beam first moved to Los Angeles, she thought she might put in just a few hours volunteering at a school for gay and transgender kids while she got settled. Instead, she found herself drawn, more deeply than she could ever have imagined, into the pained and powerful group of transgirls she discovered.

In Transparent she introduces four of them – Christina, Dominique, Foxxjazell, and Ariel. As she earns their trust she shows us their world, a dizzying mix of familiar teenage cliques and crushes with far less familiar challenges like how to morph your body on a few dollars a day. Funny, heartbreaking, defiant, and sometimes defeated, the girls form a singular community. But they struggle valiantly to resolve the gap between the way they feel inside and the way the world sees them – and who among us can’t identify with that?

Beam’s astute reporting, sensitive writing, and passionate engagement with her characters place this book in the ranks of the very best narrative nonfiction.

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