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 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. ( )