A/S/L
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A transformational, transformative story about video games, three queer friends, and the code(s) they learn to survive, from the winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Trans Fiction
1998: Lilith, Sash, and Abraxa are teenagers, scattered across the country but joined by the Internet as they create Saga of the Sorceress, a video game that will change everything, if only for the three of them.
Eighteen years later, Saga of the Sorceress still exists only on the scattered drives of its creators. Lilith works as a loan underwriter at a rinky-dink bank in Manhattan, a trans woman in a very cis world. Sash is in Brooklyn, working as a part-time webcam dominatrix. Neither knows that the other is in New York, or that Abraxa is just across the Hudson River, sleeping on the floor of a friend’s Jersey City home after a disaster at sea. They have never met in person and have been out of touch for years, but none have forgotten the sorceress or her unfinished quest.
Weaving together the technologies of two decades, and a healthy dose of magic, A/S/L is a novel that queers our notions of nostalgia, friendship, and even the possibilities of fiction itself, confirming Jeanne Thornton as one of our best and most ambitious novelists.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
