[3.5 stars]
A/S/L follows three trans women, starting when they were creating a game online anonymously as teens, then jumping to 2016 when they have moved on from this era of their lives, or have they?

Let me start off by saying how well written this book was. I enjoyed the language, the creativity therein, the slightly mixed media format. The story felt real from the character exploration, to the plot, to the writing. A truly authentic work of literature, both true to the author, but also millions of nerdy trans femmes out there who this book was clearly written for. And for all of that I have such reverence and sweet love for this book.

My reading experience was a journey. The beginning felt incredibly discombobulated and difficult to get into. The storyline got introduced so late in the book, that as someone who hadn't fully read the synopsis, I was mildly confused. I found it difficult to read the longer chapters featuring online chats (while very well executed themselves), and the characters were frustrating me to no end.

All three women in this book are incredibly bad at communicating, lack such trust, and while for good reason, this is especially presented in context with other trans femmes. I just wanted so badly for them to feel they could lean on someone in their community. To feel supported and seen. Instead they push those people away, act selfish, lacking self-awareness. I suspect I would have felt better about the book if the character growth had been more prominent, but that just wasn't the type of book this was. Which is completely fine, just not something I enjoy reading.

I am glad I read this book and will still recommend joyfully to many people who I can see absolutely loving and relating to the experiences and thoughts explored.

Thank you NetGalley and Soho press for gifting me an ARC in exchange for an honest review. <3

A/S/L is hard for me to review because I don't exactly know how to feel about it. While I really enjoyed many aspects of the book - the experience of growing up as a trans girl in the 90's and later living through the 2016 US elections, the different POVs and how there were many different things like the game descriptions and chats, the changing timelines, in the end, the book dragged a lot pace-wise and was a bit confusing when POVs and time changed with no indication. The missing quations marks were definitely not helping as it was sometimes hard to see what's a dialogue and what's not. But I really liked all three of the main characters and how different their lives were, and I think that was the strongest point of this book.

what a beautiful and immersive experience this book was - how heartbreaking, how honest, how transcendent. i loved each of the main characters, i related so hard to lilith and sasha, and i was desperately sad that they never got to meet up again as adults, in real-life. can’t recommend enough.

I attempted to listen to the audiobook but the production quality was substandard. There was a lot of background noise and mouth sounds. I also found the chat transcripts and other aspects to not work in the audiobook format. It was a no go for me.
I returned to the ebook format and found that easier to follow. Comparison to Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow came to mind. I found that book easier to follow as a non-technical person as this one had a lot more technical terminology and discussion. I gave it my best try as I was drawn to the characters but struggled with many of the details.

this book is a 4.5 star read rounded up to 5 stars.

kind of geeked that my first wish granted on netgalley was such an incredible success. this book takes place during two timelines - one set in the internet boom of irc chats and kids teaching themselves to code in the late 90's and then later, in 2016, in a world punctuated by political unrest.

our three characters are sash, abraxa, and lilith and wow, did this book accurately depict what a tool the internet used to be for kids to both work out their identities via playing with gender in chatrooms and doing web searches to find any amount of information that can help them understand the questions of their identity. similarly, it also shows some of the toxic nature of online culture, even back in the 90's, which is a precursor to the right wing radicalization of individuals in 2016.

but mostly, our three are trying to make a game. they've been inspired by a video game franchise, mystic knights. later, there's much discussion of the trans-coding of that media, how in the absence of representation trans kids had to read between the lines to feel seen in any capacity. and in their franchise, a sorceress plots to revive and revitalized the mythic northwood abbey, a safe haven of art and magic in a inhospitable world.

cut to 2016. these women are all trans, all living deeply different lives. sash is an online dominatrix, bartering cruelty for money. lilith's life is seemingly above board - she's scored a cushy bank job approving loan applications, but you soon realize it's due to the obsessive nature of her boss. and abraxa is lost, traumatized to the brink of a breakdown, drawn to a decomposing church where she thinks she might be able to recreate northwood abbey for real, because though trans people are more visible, the world is full of red hats and ever-evolving hatred against anything they've deemed against their ideologies. this story is about how these women reconnect in this new future.

there wee multiple layers to this story, from sussing out your identity in the world, internalized hatred, and the viciousness of transmisogyny, even from within the queer community. it's also about finding a space for us all where we can exist joyously. and it's about the things that we do to survive.

excellent, excellent read.

A story following three queer kids who once upon a time tried to make a video game together until one of them stopped coming online and the project was disbanded soon after. Now, 18 years later, we meet the characters as adults and get to see how they have changed: Lilith, trying to use scout mentality to find her footing in a cis world, Sash, who is a part-time webcam dominatrix and still lives with her parents, and Abraxa, mentally ill and homeless and slowly losing her connection to reality as she descends deeper into the world of the unfinished game.
While we only spend a little time with the characters as teenagers, I really found that part quite interesting. Even though I wasn’t familiar with online communities in the 1990s, I found it fun to explore how friendships and communities formed and fell apart. However, the bigger part of this novel takes place in 2016 in an America where Trump hasn’t yet been elected President (but will be during the course of the story) and follows our three main characters as they try to get through their days, diving deep into their various mental states. So if you don’t really connect with the first part of the story and the chatlogs and the very detailed descriptions of video game creation, don’t worry: that’s just the beginning of the story, it does change a lot and become a lot more accessible.
One thing I particularly enjoyed with this story is how it explored the concept of sanity and madness and the very thin line between them. Abraxa, who is treated as insane by everybody around her, holds a similar dream of building a safe haven as a corporate cis woman, who applies for a loan at a bank. One of Lilith’s trans friends votes for Trump, but then acts horrified when he attacks trans people. Sash longs for community with other people, but acts in ways that make others distrust her and finds herself more and more isolated. The line between over-the-top paranoia and the actual lived experience under transmisogyny and trauma born from it is thin and dissolving constantly and I found that incredibly intriguing to read.
While I agree with some reviews that at points the story felt too long (this book is 500 pages long and not that much happens) and the ending felt a bit too abrupt, I have to say I enjoyed that too. Life (and stories such as these, which are quite lifelike) do not need to tie up in a neat little bow to be enjoyable and as I let myself get carried away by Abraxa’s, Sash’s and Lilith’s experiences. I also really enjoyed getting to see the characters as closeted/gender-questioning teens and how the story then skipped over the whole coming out and transitioning processes to their adult and out selves only hinting at what happened in the time between. It reminded me a lot of Any Other City by Hazel Jane Plante in that way.
If you like stories exploring video games or older internet culture, you will love the first part of the story. If you enjoy messy trans women and an exploration of (some of) the ways they carve out a survival in a fucked-up world, you’ll love the second part of the story. I really enjoyed it and am very glad I read it.

TW: domestic abuse (minor), drug use, fire, homophobia (minor), intrusive thoughts, psychosis, suicidal thoughts, transphobia, unreality

Not for me. Overall, I thought the premise was interesting, but as someone who isn’t a gamer, this book felt too technical for me. I couldn’t keep up with certain details. I think maybe there needs to be a sort of middle ground maybe.

Trans Rights Readathon (book 2 of 5) review📖 A literary fiction book about queer friends + late 90s setting + video games sounded like the perfect read to me! Overall I’m kind of on the fence about it but there were both things I liked and things I didn’t.

Let’s start with what I didn’t like so we can save the best for last!

My main complaint was that it was a bit too long. The story is almost 500pgs so there were definitely parts that read slower or felt a little too drawn out. I think it could’ve been 100pgs shorter and still kept it essence. I also wish the early part of the story was longer! I wanted to see more of the three women in their 90s youth making video games and wish we could’ve gotten a deeper feel for them and their lives during that time. That first part of the story goes so fast! I didn’t mind the technical game jargon at the start like other reviewers, I think that bit will be hit or miss with people.

Now for what I liked! I loved how much depth all the characters had. This a very much a character driven novel with emotions and introspection being the core of the book. They each showed a different experience of being a trans woman and the many ways that impacted their lives. The books has a lot of neurodivergent and mental health representation as well.

As I said earlier I wished there was more of their early lives because I loved the early internet culture bits at the start. The IRC chat was making me soooo nostalgic. I was in a very active IRC for a few years during the hardest time in my life and it was so meaningful to me and kept me afloat💜

Overall I did vibe with what the book was trying to do but I feel neutral about the execution. This is very much a book you’ll have to read for yourself to see how you feel about it. It comes out April 1st! Thanks to NetGalley and Soho Press for a copy of this book, it was such a uniquely written tale!

I really enjoyed this story of queer nostalgia for a deeply specific moment of internet culture, when chat rooms and text-based communication ruled. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow combined with I Saw the TV Glow.

4.25 out 5 stars.

In A/S/L, Jeanne Thornton crafted a story that is not only deeply rooted in nostalgia but also one that lingers for years after you read it.

The prose is magnificent and it untangles, questions, tries to explain, the very complicated feelings Abraxa, Sash and Lilith have.
From childhood friends on the internet to three very distinct trans women, their paths are bound to cross again, as they live within the same city without knowing it. As the story unfurls, we get to peek into their lives and their minds and how everything still connects them, in some strange way, to that massive fangame they made when they were much younger.
It was sometimes hard to follow how the characters felt and reacted to everything they were going through. That iniatially bothered me - particularly while reading Abraxa's POVs - but as I kept reading, I found that I was allowing myself to enjoy their way of processing their thoughts as something that's not always making sense or that's not always following a clear reason followed by explanation logic. So, overall, I think what Jeanne Thornton built on a narration standpoint is stellar and palpable. It made me feel invested and I wanted to know all the little details. It made it feel real.

If you love character-driven stories, trans women coming into themselves and video games, you'll cherish A/S/L deeply.

Thank you Soho Press, Jeanne Thornton and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC. This review is entirely my own and honest opinion.

Thank you to NetGalley and Soho Press for this ARC.

I loved the integration of games to the daily lives of our main characters and following their journey as teen online friends who are trying to code their own game, and in their adulthood.

The only thing was that the book was a 100 pages too long, but otherwise beautifully written!

I wanted to love this novel so bad! The synopsis sounded incredible, but I just couldn’t get into the overall story. I wanted to feel nostalgia while reading it, but the writing style wasn’t very good. I love novels about computers games but this one was such a letdown. The characters were interchangeable and I lost interest halfway through. Such a disappointment.

The book's description pulled me in but the writing didn't meet my expectations. Difficult-to-read chat logs (I'm not sure if this was intentional or corrected pre-publication) with a lot of lingo that will be unfamiliar to many readers (even for those who were teens in the 90s) and overly descriptive prose really made this book drag.

Video game themes are not all successful and this one really doesn’t grab attention. There is too much detail about game specs for this reader.

Thank you to NetGalley and Soho Press for this ARC!

In A/S/L we follow the story of three trans women, starting with them as teeangers still trying to figure themselves out in the 90s, as they work on a video game together, and ending with them as women in their 30s in 2016.

As someone who was born in 2001 I can’t say that I know particularly much about what the internet was like back then, but I’ve always been fascinated by the culture that was created by the numerous niche websites, blogs and forums you could find back then, now of course largely replaced by well-known social media sites, so I really enjoyed that element of this book. I found the chatroom conversations a bit hard to follow at times, especially since I was very much unfamiliar with that style of messaging one another, but I’m sure if you are older than me and grew up with that sort of thing you will have a grand nostalgic time.

In the same vein I unfortunately also didn’t understand absolutely anything related to the game they were creating, which had me struggling quite a lot in the earlier parts of the book, as I hadn’t expected for there to be quite as much lingo, so to speak, as there was. However this eased up significantly later in the book, so even if you are like me and have no clue about anything video game related, and even less so video game culture in the 90s, you can still have a good time if you stick it out.

I think Thornton did an absolutely fantastic job of giving all the characters whose POV we got to read from a distinctive voice, you could show me a paragraph without any identifying information and just from the character’s style of speaking/thinking I could immediately identify who it is. And not only did all the characters each have a distinctive voice from each other, I also generally found the way they thought to be very unique.

To me the way mental illness and neurodivergence were represented in the characters was well done in a way that was uncomfortable and painful because of how relatable it was. This was actually one of the elements of the book I struggled the most with, as I could often see myself in the characters and their thought patterns and actions, which is a bit of a disconcerting experience when you have internalised biases towards said issues. However, this is also one of the reasons I would say that this is an important book, because it shows these issues without really pathologising or naming them, confronting the reader with them in a way that causes discomfort that I would describe as necessary for one to reflect on one’s own biases and perceptions.

Of course I also liked the way the trans experience was shown here. I feel that often trans characters are kind of “forced” to be at least somewhat put together and “respectable” to a wider audience, but for a group that is so often the victim of violence and exclusion from opportunities it is only natural to often be forced onto the messier side of life. I really liked the way that the effect each character’s transness has on their lives, on the jobs they have, the friends they keep, the romantic and intimate relationships they attempt is represented here. I think this could be quite comforting to read for other trans (and cis!) people who have found themselves forced to the outskirts of society.

Overall I would say that while I can’t recommend this book to everyone, there certainly is an audience for this. If you like video games and older internet culture, messy trans women and the ways the world beats one down, then this is the book for you.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book will be published in the US by Soho Press on April 1, 2025.

Full Rating: 4.25 stars rounded up

Jeanne Thornton’s A/S/L is a deeply evocative novel that pulses with the ache of queer longing, the glitchy hum of '90s internet culture, and the fractured beauty of trans survival. Spanning both 1998 and 2016, the book traces the lives of Abraxa, Sash, and Lilith—once gender-questioning teens crafting a video game called Saga of the Sorceress in an online chatroom, now estranged trans women navigating the messy terrain of adulthood.

Thornton’s prose captures the jagged edges of trans becoming: at times dreamy and poetic, other times raw and disjointed, reflecting the precarity of forging an identity under systems designed to erase you. The book hums with the tension between fantasy and reality—between the worlds we build to survive and the ones that threaten to break us. The teens’ game-building is rendered with reverence, positioning video games as queer art forms—portals into self-determination, into worlds where bodies and identities are mutable, magic. This creative defiance carries into adulthood, where the characters remain tethered to their shared past, still reaching for that elusive sense of home.

Abraxa is a tempest of restless movement and fierce imagination, clinging to the belief that Saga of the Sorceress was something more than a game—that it was, and still is, real. Lilith, burdened by the Boy Scout creeds of loyalty and self-discipline, seeks safety in cisnormative approval yet yearns for something wilder. Sash, craving connection, funnels her emotions into storytelling and financial domination, grasping for intimacy in commodified spaces. Each woman aches to be seen—not as a symbol or spectacle, but as a person worthy of love, creation, and survival.

If the novel stumbles, it’s in its pacing; certain chapters drag, and the structure occasionally feels unwieldy. But the emotional core remains potent. Thornton refuses tidy resolutions—because trans lives are not tidy. Instead, she offers something more radical: the possibility of rebuilding, together.

📖 Recommended For: Lovers of introspective trans fiction, stories exploring online communities and digital subcultures, and readers drawn to narratives about queer friendship and creative world-building; anyone nostalgic for late '90s internet culture or interested in the intersections of gender, technology, and art; and fans of Idlewild by James Frankie Thomas.

🔑 Key Themes: Trans Identity and Becoming, Queer Community and Longing, Creativity as Survival, Digital Worlds and Self-Determination, Power and Vulnerability in Relationships.

Content / Trigger Warnings: Transphobia (severe), Homophobia (moderate), Suicidal Thoughts (minor), Domestic Abuse (minor), Physical Abuse (minor), Toxic Relationship (minor), Sexual Content (severe), Fire (minor), Abandonment (minor), Drug Use (severe).

This will be one of my favorites of the year, and probably of the 2020s. Jeanne Thornton's A/S/L is so, so beautiful, at once heartbreaking and heart-healing.

In 1998, something happens that causes video game “corporation” Invocation LLC to disband before ever releasing a single game.
Twenty years later, the three women who made up the company, now adults, lead entirely separate lives but find themselves drawn together by the game they never finished and the sorceress at its heart.
I loved this— beautifully written and a really interesting and honest explorations of growing up online.
I loved the different styles of writing too. Each character has a slightly different narration style and their voices come through so vividly. Chapters are interspersed with emails, forum posts, game walkthroughs and ASCII art. A/S/L feels like it contains worlds— I went to look up Mythic Knights after reading it and was so shocked that it didn’t really exist.
Recommended for anyone who likes trans literary fiction or writing about video games.

DNF @ 22%
Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC!

The easy comparison here considering this is a story about following friends who make a video game together is ofcourse tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. I’d say if you found that one “too technical” on the gaming side though, this executes that ten fold. You get chat logs, diagrams, and pretty detailed explanations on a game level from our mcs. I do think all of this together caused the story to become a bit bloated and unfortunately no matter how many times I tried to pick this back up it just wasn’t sticking for me. Granted the commitment to the lit/tech blend is what makes this unique and that’s tough to pull off in a general sense (where the mere mention of a video game gets people claiming a story gets “too gamey” i.e TATAT), let alone as detailed as this is (at least to the point where I had dnf’d). I do like the overall idea behind this though, the rise of stories following how people are shaped and find identity online is one i find really interesting as it’s something I experienced myself. + while this wasn’t for me, I can see people really loving this.

Thank you to Soho Press and NetGalley for the ARC!

This book is totally unique and an excellent addition to the body of queer/trans literature. It will easily appeal to fans of video games and LGBTQ+ readers, particularly older millennials.