A/S/L

March 1, 2025

Thornton, who won the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction with Summer Fun, creates a slightly confusing, intricate read in this newest work centered on the lives of three characters across nearly two decades. As teens, Lilith, Sash, and Abraxa make a video game, meeting only online through its creation, but as they grow up and grow apart, the game doesn't get finished. Nearly 20 years later, they are still unknown to each other, even as they are all physically living within the wider NYC area. Told through various media, such as emails and DMs, from multiple points of view, and without quotation marks, the story can be hard to follow as it traces the lives, problems, woes, and tribulations of the game makers. Thornton has created a one-of-a-kind book, with a great idea propelling it, though it could have been executed more clearly. VERDICT The story increases in power and interest as it develops, leaving readers with many questions at the end.--Autumn West

Copyright 2025 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 24, 2025
Thornton (Summer Fun) chronicles three queer friends’ search for meaning and identity in this ambitious and playful novel. In 1998, high schoolers Lilith, Sash, and Abraxa collaborate online to build and test a video game called Saga of the Sorceress. They possess varying levels of talent and focus but maintain friendly, trans-inclusive banter in their gamer chat room, as when Sash defends Abraxa against a transphobic interloper. Though they don’t finish the game and go their separate ways after high school, they reunite and meet IRL for the first time in 2016 New York City. Lilith, a trans woman, holds a joyless bank job, Sash works as a webcam dom, and Abraxa has begun reviving the Sorceress video game in a New Jersey church basement. As Thornton chronicles the characters’ sex lives, relationships, and gender transitions, she explores their deep-seated longings and regrets. Though the narrative meanders, the determinedly upbeat tone carries the reader along, as do the novel’s dynamic stylistic elements, such as old-school online chat threads and low-bit illustrations of the game. Readers will rally around this feel-good tale of trans friendship. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency.

Starred review from March 15, 2025
Three queer women discover that the internet really is forever. It's 1998, and teenagers Abraxa, Sash, and Lilith are making a video game. They've never met in person, but they meet online to discuss their plans forSaga of the Sorceress, inspired by a character from the Mystic Knights video game franchise. Abraxa, a brash trans girl, is responsible for the game's art, coding, and music; Sash, a lesbian with a curt and serious manner, handles the writing; and Lilith is the level designer, struggling under the weight of the others' expectations. Then Lilith suddenly disappears and Sash disbands the company the three formed to create the game, which is never finished. In 2016, before the presidential election, Abraxa crashes at a friend's house in Jersey City following yet another misadventure. She discovers a dilapidated church and begins squatting in its basement, reimagining the space as "what the sorceress is asking her to build." In Brooklyn, Lilith works as an assistant loan underwriter at a bank; she constantly asks if she's "pushing herself hard enough so that no one would categorize her as a problem, a queer, an aberration." Sash lives with her parents, also in Brooklyn, and she lies to them about employment prospects while supporting herself via online sex work. She's beset with doubts about her future and regrets about her past, communicated with immediacy and feeling through second-person narration. The pursuits that consumed them as teenagers have never let these women go, and their paths will soon cross again. Thornton has a skillful command of worldbuilding, both in the physical world and within chat rooms and 2D video games. She writes with profound, incisive authority about relationships, not only between trans and cisgender people--of one of her bank clients, a well-meaning but pushy cis woman, Lilith thinks, "Cis people didn't like being reminded of the hurt places at the border between them and others"--but also about the dynamics that exist within trans communities, as well as among co-workers, families, and, perhaps most importantly, friends. A dazzlingly creative and heartfelt novel.

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