Roller Girl

by Vanessa North

July 23, 2016 · Riptide Publishing

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I was reading Twitter on the treadmill Monday morning when I saw an announcement go by that this book had been released. F/F romance with a trans heroine and roller derby?

It is a testament to some kind of total body skill that I managed to one-click buy without falling off or hitting the wall. Apparently, I have walking muscle memory and one-click buy muscle memory in equal amounts.

I started reading while walking, and ended up spending more time walking than I meant to. I found that each time I picked up this story, the same thing happened – more time passed than I meant to spend. This is a very easy novel to enter and re-enter. I don’t think that’s solely a function of it being first person, present tense – which I know bugs the hell out of some of you but doesn’t bother me too much. In fact I just had to look at my copy again to make sure I wasn’t mistaken. Yup, first person, present tense, and still very easy to re-enter. I think it’s the quality of the main character, Tina, that makes the narrative so welcoming.

Tina is a trans woman who wakes up to find her dog is very wet because her washing machine is very flooded. Her ex-wife was the one who ran the household and kept everything organized, and thanks to a note left in the desk about which plumbers are good and which are awful, Tina gets an emergency appointment to fix the machine. (The dog is fine – he just needed a bath. Also, his name is Elvis.) The plumber who shows up, Joe – short for Joanne – takes Tina’s breath away. The attraction is mutual, but when Joe asks Tina out for a beer, Tina learns that her interest isn’t merely romantic: Joe is building a roller derby team, and wants Tina to try out.

There are a couple of things that I loved about Tina’s character.

Tina is deeply aware of herself and equally compassionate toward herself, too. She’s supportive and encouraging toward her training clients, her derby teammates, Joe, her friends – she’s a truly lovely human being.

Tina is also fascinating because her life is for the most part focused on her physical body and the bodies of others, and on physical limitations and infinite possibility. She was a professional athlete, and competed in high-level and lucrative wakeboarding tournaments. She’s now a personal trainer, and keeps herself in very, very good shape, while also supporting and encouraging people to find and surpass their fitness limitations. She’s now competing in roller derby and feeling how arduous the demands of the sport are, and, like the other women who are competing, she’s very proud of how far she pushes herself into new aches and new sport territory. She’s also transitioned medically, and while she doesn’t talk about it a lot in the course of the story except to say it happened, I’ve had a lot to think about regarding the way in which her very close and attentive relationship to her physical body informed her character. She’s compassionate toward herself and her clients and her friends, even when they aren’t being kind to themselves. Her constant generosity and determined kindness are beautiful elements to her narration.

There are moments of incredible poignancy in this story that stem from that accepting self-awareness, like this one shortly after Joe and Tina meet:

Her eyes focus over my shoulder. “Holy shit, are all those yours?”

I glance back to see what she’s looking at. Ugh. My trophy wall. Row upon row of mostly second-place trophies with my dead name on them.

“Yeah. I used to be a pro wakeboarder.” My face gets hot-not from embarrassment, but something else, something I have a hard time pinning down. “A long time ago.”

She works out in a room of her accomplishments under a name and identity that isn’t hers any longer. She doesn’t take them down, but doesn’t show them off either. There are a few moments of “then vs now” that are emotional and delicate and so well done.

There’s a lightness and optimism to the world of this story, too, wherein things that could potentially go ugly do not, and any hint of tension or antagonism based on prejudice or rejection doesn’t come to pass. I don’t want to spoil the plot, so I’m hiding this section:

There is a level of kindness and warmth baked into this story, and I’m having a difficult time explaining it. Any time I thought something could potentially turn ugly or cruel, it didn’t. Problems are solved with compassion and ordinary adulting, and I appreciated that. The poignancy comes from Tina’s experiences, but not because all her experiences are cruel and negative.

It’s hard to grade a story where I really liked the characters, and I really liked the portrayal of friendship, but the romance itself wasn’t as strong. I wish there had been a little more of everything that happened between Tina and Joe. They go from meeting to intense connection and frank intimacy to emotional complications very quickly, and I think part of my lack of engagement was the lack of development of Joe. This is very much Tina’s story, and Joe isn’t as vivid. I didn’t always buy the romance between Tina and Joe as a result.

For me, this was a story wherein I didn’t quite understand or believe in the romance, but because Joe made Tina happy, I wanted everything to work out for her. Does that make sense? I wasn’t invested in the courtship, but Tina was happy with Joe and miserable without her. Even though I didn’t think they’d really worked out their issue(s), and I felt like parts of the development of their relationship were missing, I wanted Tina to have happiness because I cared about her. I didn’t feel much for the connection between Tina and Joe, but I had all kinds of feels about Tina.

I know that the other characters in Tina’s circle of friends are the subjects of other books, but aside from Ben, they weren’t distinguishable from one another to an extent that I felt like I had been fully introduced to them, or wanted to go find out more about them. Part of that feeling may be attributed to the established state of their relationships in this book, but there were times wherein I felt that their gatherings and conversations were repetitive and didn’t do much to move the story. Ben, on the other hand, has a wonderful friendship with Tina, and his constancy and genuine love and support for Tina were lovely.

As I said, this is difficult to grade. I loved the time I spent in the world of this story, with Tina and with Ben and with the roller derby team. I loved the way the friendships were written, most especially Tina’s deep friendship with herself. I wish there had been more to the romantic aspects and to the conflicts between Joe and Tina, which aren’t very compelling, but I still have a happy post-reading smile and feelings of affection for this book.