Bellies

Rating: 4.5* of five

WINNER of the 2024 Polari First Book Prize

The Publisher Says: I wore a dress on the night I first met Ming.

It begins as your typical boy meets boy. While out with friends at their local university drag night, Tom buys Ming a drink. Confident and witty, a magnetic young playwright, Ming is the perfect antidote to Tom’s awkward energy, and their connection is instant. Tom finds himself deeply and desperately drawn into Ming’s orbit, and on the cusp of graduation, he’s already mapped out their future together. But shortly after they move to London to start their next chapter, Ming announces her intention to transition.

From London to Kuala Lumpur, New York to Cologne, we follow Tom and Ming as they face tectonic show more shifts in their relationship and friend circle in the wake of Ming’s transition. Through a spiral of unforeseen crises—some personal, some professional, some life-altering—Tom and Ming are forced to confront the vastly different shapes their lives have taken since graduating, and each must answer the essential question: Is it worth losing a part of yourself to become who you are?

Buoyed by a voice as tender, effervescent and wryly funny as the cast of characters it centers, Bellies is an unforgettable story of youth, intimacy, hunger and heartbreak, at once boldly original yet fiercely familiar, which unabashedly holds a mirror up to our most vulnerable selves and desires.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The depth of my youthful ignorance was forcefully recalled to me as I read this novel. I knew a transfem lady in my youth. I was utterly rejecting and actively unpleasant to her, a thing that recalling in my elderqueer years I view with horror at my cruelty.

If she is still alive (not a given for QUILTBAG people my age), I hope it is a life accompanied by a circle of people knowing her, giving her the fullest experience of being loved, accepted, and celebrated for being herself. It shames me what I thought, felt, and—mortifyingly—said to her when she came out to me. Living well is the best revenge. I hope she has had her revenge on me in spades these past five decades. My own trans family and friends have reason to thank her for bringing my unreasoning prejudice to the forefront to be confronted.

I came to this story, then, predisposed to find in it a measure of redemption. Not mine, but Ming's as she comes to realize transitioning is her only path forward to a fulfilling life..."I feel like I’ve been drawing an outline of myself using negative space"...while knowing it means literally never going back to her birth family; and Tom's, as he comes into contact with an entirely new spectrum of identities just as being gay is really settling in as his honest identity. His gayness, kindness (edging into codependence), and almost desperate desire to help are deeply familiar to me. "I have a bad habit of going along with things that aren't right for me, and I'm just trying to do the things a person would do if they loved themselves as much as they loved other people." So relatable!

Much as in Disappoint Me (q.v.), the heaviest descriptive lifting is being done in service of food. Like that book, it's always true that food descriptions are in a heightened register. Do not read this book while hungry. If you're wise, only do so after your favorite stick-to-your-ribs meal is on board and you have something dessertable on hand.

Like any story about being a young adult, still less one who is transitioning and one who is in love with someone making the transition, there are a lot of operatically heightened emotions flowing around. The friend group Ming and Tom create all have drama, upsets, ideas and opinions of Ming of Tom of Life...you remember. It's a messy, intense time. It's the meatiest chunk of a life well-lived, and these young folk are living it! I confess to feeling worn out by the intensity of it: "I'd spent years feeling happy to be nourished by Ming's light, so much so that I'd never asked what I could be for myself, only what I could be for her. I'd long suspected that Ming shone brighter than me, the same way I'd suspected Sarah {the girl he left for Ming} did, too". I suspect I supplied the intensity as Author Dinan reserves her descriptive riches more for food.

A beautiful, passionate evocation of one's early adulthood, replete with relatable drama, unimaginably brave and accepting people bound tighter than they ever will be again, and the most wonderful thing of all: Discovering Love. show less

Bellies is a difficult novel to write about. I've begun and deleted this review repeatedly and am still struggling. It's complicated in the ways humans are complicated, with feet planted in multiple cultures and identities. Its cast of characters is young—19 to 25 or so—and that youth means that they're still figuring out who they are, and that who-they-are is in flux. Tom and Ming, two gay college students meet at a drag event and fall in love. By the novel's end, Tom is still a gay man, Ming is a woman, and they both—along with their friends—have been through wave after wave of affection, conflict, communication, miscommunication, and (in the minds of at least some of them) betrayal.

The characters in this novel are irritating show more in that way young people can be irritating: simultaneously serious and thoughtless, struggling to answer complicated questions with their relatively brief lifetimes of experience on which to draw. As a reader, I found my irritation forcing a kind of self-critical forgiveness. When I was young, I was young. I was serious and thoughtless, concerned with complexity while having lived relatively little. And I realized how much that young me would have irritated the older me. That knowledge does make it easier to embrace the novel's characters.

What most moved me about Bellies was the sincerity with which this group of friends worked to love, respect, and make room for one another. They're a global cast, drawn from different cultures and different parts of the world, drawn to the arts, activism, and commerce (because graduating from college puts commerce smack in the middle of everything they have to deal with).

Bellies is a novel to read when when you want a panoramic dose of reality, one that tries to fit in all possibilities and to see them reconciled.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via Edelweiss; the opinions are my own. show less

This book was a lot. A lot of description. A lot of dialogue. A lot of something’s going on while nothing’s actually going on. A lot of emotion and conflict and internal struggles. A lot of growing up.

I liked the exploration of relationships, the trans experience, and grief. I didn’t like how mental health was used as a plot device.

DNF at 66% into the audiobook. I wanted to really like this one, and I was initially invested in it for the most part but I think I have trouble with lit fic occasionally. I just found myself getting slowly less interested as it went on which is a bummer, bc I think it’s written really well and I cared about both main characters. I think this is a def more of a me thing, and my current reading mood, than indicative of the novel itself, which I would still rec after reading a good chunk of it.

I'm not sure how far I'll get with this. It's something I'd like to read, but it's frustrating. I'm 2 hours into a 12 hour novel.

So far its potential is undercut by how the narrative is playing out - parts are skimmed over that shouldn't be, and vice versa, in developing the relationship between Ming and Tom. I'm not invested.

The uni drag night is such a great beginning but still, some of the potential sparkle isn't actualised.