This book started out strong for me, but ending up being a "did not finish" because it couldn't hold my attention and I just didn't connect with the story.

This book was a lot! It's a bit of a sci-fi and I love those no matter how confusing they are, and yes, this was very confusing. I don't think I understood everything that happened but I still enjoyed it. I liked how it was all "in your face". No minced words, but raw content. It might not be for everyone but it really was a one of a kind story. Also yay for trans characters and trans journeys!

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for giving me a free advanced copy of this book to read and review.

An interesting attempt at blending sci fi and satire, though the book succeeds more with the former than the latter.

The premise for this is potentially a good one, though I struggled a lot with the setting both in terms of initially investing in the story and throughout as the plot unfolded.

Our three central characters are much more intriguing from the start, and watching them evolve and adapt is the best part of the book. They’re flawed but likable, nuanced, and compelling.

The fantasy aspects of this are finely done and fairly standard, competently drawn if a bit stale for a book that’s clearly attempting to be edgy.

And that’s where this one misses: As a satire. People mistake a lot of things for satire (shock humor, meanness, absurdity, to name a few), and this book leans more on those things than it should. It’s not really a true satire, or at least it doesn’t read like one even if that was the intent. A lot of the humor feels mean when it’s clearly aiming to be satirical, and the comic plot points read more like absurdity than satire.

There’s some good writing here at times and good character work, but the plot and the attempt to cross genres was less successful.

I honestly don't know what this book was about. I don't think that I was smart enough to grasp any sort of satire and really just ended up being confused for the majority of it. I am clearly in the minority here because a lot of the reviews are glowing but this true one just wasn't for me..

Extremely funny and reflective story about transness, the internet, and queer community. I spent the book laughing at Pen's exploits and being gut-punched by lines about being trans that resonated very deeply.

I don't know that I've ever read anything like this book or ever will again. As a trans guy who spent many pre-transition years jealous of trans YouTubers who were further along in their transition journey, elements of this book were very relatable. Intriguing concept, and the near future setting was clever as well.

The premise of this book interested me, but I couldn't get into the narrative voice at all. I'm guessing the author was going for something very specific stylistically, but personally it did not work for me. DNF.

This book had so many great ideas and was really fun to read. I thought there were some structural issues and pacing problems. It was sometimes hard to keep track of how much time was passing. The adopted Asian character was underdeveloped and seemed to function as a token, rather than as a fully developed character which I thought was disappointing.

Released June 1, 2021

Future Feeling
By. Josh Lake
Soft Skull Press
P. 294
Format: eArc
Rating: ****
**********************
I received an e-arc from @Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
**********************

Future Feeling is a mystical trans fantasy novel. If that does not hook you instantly, then this may not be the novel for you.

Penfield R. Henderson is a dog walker in New York. He is haunted by the R in his name which stands for Ruth, the last remnant of his gender assigned at birth. He is also haunted by Aiden, a trans super influencer on the gram. Aiden shows a life that is a little too perfect. It is too much for Penfield to take. So, he does what any logical trans man would do. He uses his hacker roommate to hack into Aiden’s social media account. Then, he has his witch roommate send out a hex. Except, the hex does not hit Aiden. Instead, it attaches itself to Blithe, a trans man adopted from China. The hex sends Blithe to the Shadowlands. The Rhiz, a mythical organization for all trans beings, charge Penfield and Aiden to work together to bring him back.

This book is written whimsically but covers very deep topics. The book itself is amazing. I wish there was a Rhiz organization to initiate and connect all trans beings. The relationships that are formed are messy, but they are all the better for it. This novel is a validation to all trans beings that you are not alone. For all nontrans beings, then it allows you a glimpse into the mystical tribe.

For the most part, this book is set in a very familiar everyday setting. However, the technology is just slightly advanced. I think this was done, mostly, to highlight the more fantastical elements of the novel. It really makes more of a fusion novel than one set in any specific genre. Which, especially considering the subject matter, really works well.

Near future trans story, ahoy! I really enjoyed this one. There were some cheeky turns of phrase and an overall enjoyed plot. 4/5 stars.

The first half of this book is so fantastic--imaginative, funny, irreverent, and full of the sort of delights afforded by satire and parody, with an entirely original bent. The nebbish--insecure, petty, solipsistic, "languishing", self-deprecating but only to the end of further self-obsession--trans male narrator is love-hateable, that irritating roommate you can't kick out because his dramas and habits make for great second-hand anecdotes (and because secretly you actually like him sometimes).

I took so much pleasure in recognition of each oh-so-recognizable detail. For example: the maddening abs/Deep Stare of Aiden, trans influencer and thirst trap; the Witch who is ideologically opposed to cleaning on the grounds that it's anti-natural; the pampered trans guy, Blithe, whose parents tend to each stage of his transition so completely that he misses out on his destined identity crisis. I could go on!

The plot offers the pleasures of every buddy comedy when mismatched duo jacked, passing Aiden and soft-tummied Pen who is deemed not manly enough to entire the men's locker room sauna at his gym (which, to be fair, seems to be a Hell's Angels outpost). And especially after reading a particularly butch trans memoir, what a relief to journey along inside a winkingly failed masculinity that subverts generations of Jewish male literary self-deprecation into a manhood perfectly designed for the Jewish trans man to kick back and smoke a join inside of.

Why why WHY, then does the book end in tension-less chapters of wish fulfillment, personal growth, and pages-long treatises on the Indigenous Oaxacan origins of mushroom use and various characters of color reduced to lesson-imparters for white Pen--the lesson being, I'm not here to teach you a lesson about race. Except they are? Same for the circle-jerk of fundamentally similar people analyzing to death their minute differences with the smug mutual appreciation of those who've lost sight of their subculture's smallness, of the entire strange and unknowable world existing beyond the protection of their safe words?

This sounds ironic, but I don't think it is? Or if it is, the tone is strangely discordant, implying an earnest sweetness that missed the winking, complicated observations of the earlier sections. I'd be eager to read more from this author and absolutely recorded reading *parts* of this book, but I dont think the whole thing will hold up for most lit fic and satire fans. 5 stars for the first half, 2 for the second.

DNF 40% I had a really hard time getting into this book, and I think it's because I had a difficult time connecting with the characters. It wasn't so much the characters themselves, but the settings/scenarios they found themselves in. This book is a mixture of comedy, sci-fi, lgbt+ romance, but more than anything it felt like an updated take on the classic fantasy adventure. One persons calling to save the world. If you like that genre I think you'll love this book, but it wasn't for me.

Thank you to NetGalley and Soft Skull Press for providing me with an e-arc of this book in exchange for an honest review.

A fun ride that involves characters of the best extent! Futuristic and timely for sure! I think we will be seeing praise for this one.

DNF at 10%. Really not a writing style that works for me. It’s very abrasive. Definitely that writing style is something that connects to others, but I find it off putting.

Future Feeling by Joss Lake is an ambitious either not-too-distant-future or present-day-allegorical satire that centers the experiences of trans men. It’s an applaudable effort. However, the novel’s abundant weirdness and metaphorical flourishes frustratingly impede casual understanding. Unexplained world rules and a narrative as shallow as the characters it is trying to lampoon create too much work for the reader. Once you have labored through the strange words littered on the page, it doesn’t seem worth it.

Future Feeling follows Pen, a trans man obsessed with the “Gram” and the people on the platform who have been able to leverage their traditionally attractive bodies for fame and fortune. One such individual, Aiden, has everything that Pen wants, and when Pen decides to hex Aiden with the help of his witch roommate as recompense for his envy he is forced to confront his feelings of self-worth in order to rescue another trans individual from a cruel fate in the Shadowlands. This synopsis is wild. With a plot as strange and fantastical as this one, Future Feeling should be a lot more fun. I found it to be such a slog to get through, and the constant allusions to influencers and content creation seems less like commentary on a rotten social media obsessed culture and more like a validation. It doesn’t help that the book is hard to follow since Lake doesn’t spend too much time building the world and explaining “the rules” of this fantastical near-reality.

Still, this kind of dysphoria and lack of a center could be part of a larger allegory the author is trying to draw as it pertains to queer experiences. While an admirable premise for a novel, it needs to have more coherence to really work.

Pen, Aiden, and Blithe, the three trans guys in the book, learn that growing up to be a healthy human adult means dealing with all of life's issues, not just their trans identity. Defining for oneself a meaningful career, fulfilling friendships and sexual relationships, a life purpose, is so much more than, yet never separate from, living in one's true gender.

Future Feeling gives a glimpse into the emotional journey of socially and physically transitioning female (as assigned at birth) to male. Lake accomplishes this in a way that is more nuanced than any novel I’ve previously read and certainly more fun and entertaining. Having personal experience with this journey some 20+ years ago, I’m typically not inclined to revisit the experience in either fiction or non-fiction. Future Feeling is a completely on point read in this regard because the story itself is dealing with exactly WHY I warily approach art or news or anything else that seeks to immerse me in the emotional landscape of mapping the journey of transition and integrating a newly transitioned body into the world. Much in the world where I transitioned has changed, certainly it was a different place than the world of Future Feeling, but yet the essentials of the journey transcend time or place.

I don't think one has to be trans, or even know a trans person, to enjoy the this book as Lake's easy, flowing prose and intriguing fantasy world are enough to draw readers in. When I was in grammar school we had mood rings which purportedly changed color if you were happy, sad, or angry. In Future Feeling, bio-metric data has been extensively collected and studied and is constantly reflected back to society in a rainbow of colors that represent overall well-being and the source of that well-being. The effects of systemic racism imbue colors on the spectrum, as does the amount of parental love one receives, the level of acceptance or reactivity one extends to others, and all manner of vicissitudes of human emotional experience. Like so much data that has been accumulated and learned by society generally, one wonders if society is using the data to better understand themselves and improve life or if it's just another piece of knowledge that changes little on a fundamental level.

A notable difference from my era - there are trans, social media celebrities. As we see from Pen, the main protagonist in the book, realizing one is trans is no longer isolating in that you think you're the only person out there, but rather that now there is a media image of what the perfect, glamorous trans person's life is. A sculpted body, material success, and other props of social status become the measuring stick of your own transition success. Addictively looking at his phone to compare himself to Aiden, who has a huge social media following, creates a different type of isolation where Pen feels he isn’t successful or can't achieve the success and adoration Aiden has, and he both envies Aiden and hates him for it.

In the world of Future Feeling, it's relatively easy to find other people of trans experience. There's even a well-funded organization that serves as support and guardians of trans persons’ well-being. In this future world, material barriers to transition are largely removed. And yet...even with this organized community, even with trans elders to magically guide and advise at critical junctures, even with the monetary challenges removed, being trans is shown to be a solitary and highly-individualized experience.

No matter our background, whether with supportive or non-supportive parents, whether from wealth or the working class, whether a person of color or white, whether an only child or with siblings, each trans person must navigate the experience on their own. It is a solitary exploration, excavation, and rejuvenation. Even trans friends can only bear witness and, hopefully, keep one from getting lost in the "Shadowlands" as the book calls it.

Really strong first novel from Joss Lake. The world building wasn’t quite as crisp toward the end (in L.A.) and the flow of the story was disjointed enough at times that I wondered if my e-book version had not formatted properly and left out a sentence or paragraph. However, those minor comments don’t distract from this 5 star reading experience.

Many thanks to #netgalley and #softskullpress for the ARC.

This is the story of Penfield R. Henderson, who is a trans man who lives in New York City in the not-so-far-flung future. He's a dog-walker, and has a secret celebrity hookup, and when he's not busy with those, he is obsessing over Aiden Chase, who is also a trans man, and one who appears (per his Gram account) to have achieved absolute physical perfection. When he meets Aiden IRL, and gets more or less blown-off, Pen employs his roommates, the Stoner-Hacker, and the Witch to put a hex on Aiden. But the hex misses Aiden and instead hits another young trans man named Blithe and pushes him into the Shadowlands, which is (and I'm not going to be able to phrase this better than the blub does) 'the dreaded emotional landscape through which every trans person must journey to achieve true self-actualization'.

The Rhiz (a sort of mildly-omnipotent agency which oversees trans matters) tells Pen and Aiden that they must find Blithe and help him out of the Shadowlands. So, Aiden and Pen team up to track him down. And of course, many shenanigans are had along the way.

I liked this book, but I didn't love it quite as much as I was expecting to. It is, just as I imagined it would be, bizarre as hell, and it took me a little while to really settle into it. That said, I still read it in a day, in just two sittings, because I found it very easy to pick up and read for hours at a time.

I didn't find myself cheering for any one character in particular, most of the time, but sort of hoping for the best for all three of them. I enjoyed how the relationship between all three characters had evolved through their whole adventure together, and by the end, I was satisfied with how everything turned out, even if I thought the book itself ended rather abruptly.

My biggest problems were that sometimes the timeline was hard to keep track of, and often weeks or months would pass with no apparent change in anything happening. I actually have no idea how long these three spent in Pen's tiny apartment. In terms of the book, it was maybe a third? In terms of time, I think it was several months, but I actually have no idea. Sometimes things would happen that really had no real relevance to the plot and seemed out of place. Like Pen would go out for drinks with a previously unmentioned friend, or go to the pool, or something like that and it would throw me out of the story a bit because none of it seemed to matter to things that were happening. At times, it felt like it was trying to do a little too much at once.

All told though, I thought it was unique AF and told an interesting story. I enjoyed my afternoon with it. ^_^

“Wildly inventive” is right. Joss Lake writes in a tight weaving of what might seem to be a range of ideas, but it all comes together in a literary and intriguing way. A pleasure to read!

I submitted my recommendation/review of this book to the ABA Indies Next list but didn't save it before hitting send! I think/hope that this feedback goes to the same place.