A breakneck and beautiful coming-of-age novel of the modern ballroom scene
"You don't want to get into the full fantasy of you?" Tameeka Ortiz is a black Puerto Rican trans girl living in the Highbridge Projects of the South Bronx. She's still a teenager, and her surly dad's out of prison--smoking, drinking, yelling she has to be a man. Her mother's long dead, though her ancestral spirit's alive, and so is the Fem Queen elder downstairs. Tameeka's been going out in boy drag with fem clothes in paper bags to shine in the Ballroom Scene. Her dad has no idea. What's going to happen to her? In lightning dialogue and dreamy prose, Venus Green's Formation crashes onto the scene as one of the decade's great bildungsromans. Magnetic, charming, and deeply spiritual, Formation captures the ache and chaos of family, trans girlhood, and taking the first steps of forming yourself for the world.