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A review by paperrcuts
Trumpet by Jackie Kay
4.0
This is the story of a trans man & famous jazz trumpet player, told through the lens of others. This man dies. His riotous son discovers that his father was born a woman. The world discovers he was born a woman. Chaos ensues.
I loved this nostalgic and heartbreaking book. The short chapters and intertwined story lines were beautifully accomplished. The range of perspectives is endless: starting from the bereft wife, the asshole of a son, the terfy journalist looking for clout out of the story, to all the people Josh Moody had known, and those who got to know him in death (a doctor and a mortician are offered chapters as well, and they were oh so interesting). The only thing that keeps me from giving this a full-fledged 5 stars is how insufferable the son was overall. It's a good thing when characters make you angry, but I also think this character could have made me less angry, and it took away from one facet of the book's "realistic" unfolding, for me.
However, the book was beautiful and tragic and so well-written. The author herself is not trans, but the story is inspired from a real-life personality, Bill Tipton, a trans man who was, too, revealed as trans after his death, and from what I have seen, trans reviewers think highly of the story, too. The book equally deals with the notion of race, and it comes from the author's own experience with mixed race parents. I do wish the book had focused more on first-hand experience, disclosed by Joss Moody himself, rather than exposing others' reactions to his outing, but that clearly wasn't Kay's intention, and anyways, for what this book was set out to accomplish, it did so masterfully.
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"I have some of his bandages here at Torr. I don’t know what to do with them. I can’t throw them away. I can’t give away these bandages. I can’t burn them or bury them or throw them into the dustbin. They are in the top drawer of my chest of drawers here along with my white cotton underwear. They lie in there curled and sleeping like a small harmless animal. They smell of him still. They smell of his music; the peat smell of jazz."
I loved this nostalgic and heartbreaking book. The short chapters and intertwined story lines were beautifully accomplished. The range of perspectives is endless: starting from the bereft wife, the asshole of a son, the terfy journalist looking for clout out of the story, to all the people Josh Moody had known, and those who got to know him in death (a doctor and a mortician are offered chapters as well, and they were oh so interesting). The only thing that keeps me from giving this a full-fledged 5 stars is how insufferable the son was overall. It's a good thing when characters make you angry, but I also think this character could have made me less angry, and it took away from one facet of the book's "realistic" unfolding, for me.
However, the book was beautiful and tragic and so well-written. The author herself is not trans, but the story is inspired from a real-life personality, Bill Tipton, a trans man who was, too, revealed as trans after his death, and from what I have seen, trans reviewers think highly of the story, too. The book equally deals with the notion of race, and it comes from the author's own experience with mixed race parents. I do wish the book had focused more on first-hand experience, disclosed by Joss Moody himself, rather than exposing others' reactions to his outing, but that clearly wasn't Kay's intention, and anyways, for what this book was set out to accomplish, it did so masterfully.
- - -
"I have some of his bandages here at Torr. I don’t know what to do with them. I can’t throw them away. I can’t give away these bandages. I can’t burn them or bury them or throw them into the dustbin. They are in the top drawer of my chest of drawers here along with my white cotton underwear. They lie in there curled and sleeping like a small harmless animal. They smell of him still. They smell of his music; the peat smell of jazz."