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Title details for Cactus Country by Zoë Bossiere - Available

Cactus Country

A Boyhood Memoir

by Zoë Bossiere
Zoë Bossiere
Audiobook
32 of 32 copies available
Borrow Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
32 of 32 copies available
A STRIKING MEMOIR OF GENDERFLUIDITY, CLASS, AND THE AMERICAN SOUTHWEST
Newly arrived in the Sonoran Desert, eleven-year-old Zoë enters a world of giant beetles, thundering javelinas, and gnarled palo verde trees. In Cactus Country RV Park, Zoë has been given a fresh start and a new, shorter haircut. Although Zoë doesn't have the words to express it, he experiences life as a trans boy—and here, others begin to see him as a boy, too. Zoë spends hot days chasing shade and freight trains with an ever-rotating pack of sunburned desert kids, and nights fending off his own questions about the body underneath his baggy clothes.
As Zoë enters adolescence, he must reckon with the sexism, racism, substance abuse, and violence endemic to the working-class men he's grown close to, whose hard masculinity seems as embedded in the desert landscape as the cacti sprouting from parched earth. In response, Zoë adopts an androgynous style and new pronouns, but still cannot escape what it means to live in a gendered body, particularly when a fraught first love destabilizes their sense of self. But beauty flowers in this desert, too. Zoë persists in searching for answers, dreaming of a day they might leave the park behind to embrace whatever awaits beyond.
Equal parts harsh and tender, Cactus Country is a precisely rendered journey of self-determination that will resonate with anyone who's ever had to fight to be themself.
"Cactus Country shimmers with the complexity of becoming. Zoë Bossiere writes their way into a truer story of selfhood, resisting the simpler narratives the world demanded. The result is lush, beautiful, and deeply liberating."—Alex Marzano Lesnevich, author of The Fact of a Body

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    June 28, 2024

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9798891788749
      • File size: 250282 KB
      • Duration: 08:41:24

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from March 4, 2024
      Brevity magazine editor Bossiere’s enthralling debut depicts a young adulthood on the margins. Growing up in Arizona, Bossiere felt strongly that they were a boy, especially when running with a feral pack of young men at Cactus Country, the trailer park near Tucson where Bossiere’s parents moved from the Virginia suburbs when the author was 11. Though many of the boys and men in Bossiere’s orbit were violent and troubled, the author mirrored their dress and mannerisms to gain their acceptance. Once puberty struck, Bossiere’s ambiguous gender expression and impoverished circumstances began to make them stand out among their classmates. By high school, they no longer tried to pass as male, and gradually came to admire feminine strength. While volunteering to teach preschool in their senior year of high school, Bossiere marveled at the confident, nurturing dispositions of their female co-teachers. That experience helped situate them in a fluid, nonbinary gender expression, and stoked their ambition to escape the harsh environs of Cactus Country and attend college in Oregon. Bossiere’s concise prose style and gift for scene-setting draws readers in as they unpick the somewhat esoteric nuances of their gender identity. This will resonate with anyone who’s longed for escape—from a hometown or their own body—but lacked an exit plan. Agent: Maggie Cooper, Aevitas Creative Management.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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