Melissa Faliveno's Tomboyland: A Collection of Essays on Being a Tomboy

Labrys: While lesbians are raped and killed for holding hands with a woman they love, s8s are moaning about the world disrespecting their fetishes. Lesbians, leave the GBTQ+ which is mostly s8, penis-oriented, and misogynistic and join Get the L Out!

Germany on Aug 23, 2020

Richard P.: I picture Melissa Faliveno, author of this Amazon First Read title "Tomboyland," one day sitting in front of her computer reading these words.

I picture her laughing, perhaps wondering aloud "Who is this lunatic?"

It's a fair question.

It's a question I ask myself often and it's a question I asked myself often while reading this unexpectedly immersive, engaging collection of intimate yet universal essays exploring the mysteries of gender and desire, identity and class, and what it means when we call someplace, or someone, home.

The truth is that "Tomboyland" isn't what I expected, though I must plead guilty when I acknowledge that my expectations were influenced by my own preconceived notions of what it means to explore the intersection of identity and place and to confront achingly vulnerable questions about gender identity, queerness, sexuality, and commitment.

I expected something. I expected something else. My expectations weren't better or worse. They were simply different than what unfolds within these pages.

The truth is that the reason I picture Faliveno laughing as she reads these words is that, above all else, "Tomboyland" is a...

United States on Jul 24, 2020

Jean F. Coldwell: Eight essays: The Finger of God. Tomboy. Of a Moth. Switch-Hitter. Meat and Potatoes. Gun Country. Motherland. Driftless.

These are the compositions that make up Melissa Faliveno’s collection of essays called Tomboyland. From The Finger of God, in which she writes of tornadoes, Faliveno takes us on a very personal, sometimes stormy expression of her own self-discovery and self-expression. The F5 tornado that ravaged the small Wisconsin town near her own town of Mount Horeb is a metaphor for her own painful teen and young adult years. The Moths essay made me chuckle because my wife and I struggled with “mealy moths” for at least a whole summer until we finally rid our home of them. Unlike Melissa, we did not learn to love them. I found Meat and Potatoes to be sort of all over the place. It starts out being the way someone described her – “what you see is what you get.” And about food. But then it wanders into acknowledgement of having engaged in self-destructive behaviors – excessive drinking and drugs, self-mutilation, BDSM. It felt sort of all over the place, this spiral that eventually returns to food and back to sexual expression. This particular essay is...

United States on Jul 15, 2020