Crossing the Line by Laney Cairo

I recently joined a m/m romance group on Goodreads to try and increase my repertoire of books. Though there's a fair number of epubs out there, the quality of work produced varies a lot from book to book and I was hoping to get some recommendations to help me find the 'good stuff'.

The group has a kind of challenge each month to read books in different genres. One of the February challenges was to read something with transgender or cross-dressing as the theme and a rec led me to Crossing the Line by Laney Cairo. At 46 e-book pages, it's really a short story, not a book, and a quick read.

I really wanted to enjoy the book more. The relationship between 18 year old Isaac/Belinda and the older Nathaniel (I don't think we ever get an age on him) is both hot and sweet. Watching Belinda find herself and explore her identity and sexuality through her first lover is delightful and I read most of the story with a smile.

However, it does feel like the author tried to cram a novel's worth of story into a short story and the ending is both incredibly abrupt and sloppily attached to the rest of the story, making me feel like Cairo either was in a rush to finish or didn't know how to end it and just slapped something together. Either way, it puts a sour note in what was otherwise toothsomely sweet.

In an expanded version, I would've liked to have seen more of Belinda's birth and development in its earlier stages; when she first began experimenting with her identity and figuring out that Isaac was really (or mostly, since Belinda doesn't seem to identify as trans, in contrast to her friend Lisa) Belinda. I would also like to see more of what happens with Belinda after Nathaniel, that all-important redefining and re-finding of self after the first big love-affair.

Bound by the constraints of such a short story, Belinda's conflicts are quickly and easily resolved—hiding her identity from her mother, conflict or potential conflict at school if outed, finding a place to live and figuring out a life plan once she is outed and rejected by her mom. It can be handwaved because it is such a short story, but it would've been interesting to see those conflicts explored more deeply and in more detail.

On the other hand, I found it really delightful that the revelation of her full gender identity to Nathaniel turned out to be such a non-issue, even though Nathaniel identified as "bent but not gay". His open-mindedness, his naked and obvious pleasure in Belinda herself and in their sex life, his obvious care…these were all tremendously appealing qualities. As an older man (and a 'shiftless' artist, at that) picking up a young, queer cross-dresser, it could've been a much seedier and much more sordid relationship. In the wrong hands, it really would've come across as manipulative and creepy. But though I was preemptively cringing against that very eventuality, it never materialized and instead, Nathaniel turned out to be pretty much everything a first love should be. I really liked that.

As well, I liked that, though Lisa's mom is first presented to us as an alcoholic—another character that could've easily been blown into a judgmental and irrational stereotype—she's instead presented as caring and supportive in ways that Belinda's mom is definitely not. There's a unexpected richness to Cairo's characterization that was really a pleasure to read after having been burned so many times. I'd definitely be willing to look into more of Cairo's work and see if the bungled ending is an endemic authorial problem or a fluke.

And I really need to look into finding more good trans and/or crossdressing fiction.