Dykette is an invigorating and hilarious examination of queer identity and intimacy. It's a novel about being trapped--trapped inside your own head, trapped It feels like the queer world is constantly evolving. Maybe we're all too terminally online? But the struggle of being queer is the general outsiderness one experiences from the rest of the world. Yet at the same time, some people are just ~more~ or less gay than others, and their outsiderness exists in a different spectrum. This a major factor for Sasha, who is very feminine, versus Jesse who is masc, and other characters in the story who have had top surgery, go by they/them, etc.

This is a book full of queer vocabulary and gossip written in a bold, unapologetic way. And why should it be otherwise? With Dykette, Davis has filled what has been mostly an empty shelf in the literary world.”The trip comes at an important juncture in Sasha and Jesse’s relationship. They find themselves cycling through fights that oftentimes result from Sasha’s “high-femme camp antics.” Sasha relates to the world through performance — games, roleplay, and her various personas, including an Eastern European housewife. She theorizes her own life through Gossip Girl and Stone Butch Blues and Chloë Sevigny. Confronted with the models of her queer elder hosts, Jules and Miranda, and the arty influencer ilk of Darcy and Lou, Sasha finds herself at cross-purposes, pulled between the poles of performance and sincerity, which, increasingly, she struggles to distinguish. Jenny Fran Davis is a real troublemaker, and Dykette is my favorite kind of trouble —sexy, messy, full of gossip and glitter, and cunning, and thus of course profoundly revealing about our strange times. Text me when you finish!” The lone femme of color gets lost in the sauce of the book. Her threads are never finished. Why is she being flamed online? We never learn. What's wrong with her body, something we get hints about? We never learn. also while typing “jenny’s high femme camp antics” i couldn’t help but think of the l word’s jenny schecter

The bathroom was flooded with the soft light of a custom-made feat of industrial lamp design. Gays hated overhead lighting; Jules, their host and the house’s owner, had let the original ceiling fixture dust over, taped down the light switches. It was certainly possible that under fluorescent bulbs, the green of Sasha’s fur would not have shimmered so. Through Sasha, Davis constructs a field guide to queer dynamics, making sharp observations about generational divides, the butch/femme dynamic, and what it means to perform your gender or sexuality (as exemplified by an explosive plot about performance art). You won’t soon forget Sasha, nor any of the other larger-than-life Brooklynites in her cohort.” Over text, Davis and I discussed Dykette and ribbons and Lana Del Rey in between going to the tailor (Jenny) and taking a shower (me). Despite this, I am fond of Davis' writing style. The book was an easy, beachy kind of read even though it's set between Christmas and New Year's Day. I found some scenes genuinely impactful, the one at the upstate thrift store for instance. Even that I could have let go, having read JFD's other work and other works of the same ilk, were it not for the book's insistence on how groundbreaking and profound the narrator's internal life was. She truly writes, as does Davis, as if this work is the second coming of A Restricted Country or Stone Butch Blues. It's not.This deeply smart, original, and funny debut novel has permanently shifted my understanding of the relationship between honesty and performance .” Of course the racial dynamics were shitty, but I didn't come to this book expecting a nuanced conversation about American racial dynamics. It’s through Dykette’s Sasha, an insufferably needy high femme in her mid-20s (think Girls’ Hannah Horvath if she wore vintage pink nighties and was “straight for butches”) that Davis lays out her curiosity with queer domesticity. Sasha has the hots for Jules, a tall butch news anchor clearly inspired by Rachel Maddow, and both envies and pities Jules’s longtime partner, Miranda, for being old and boring, for having settled down in comfort and style. Though her own gaze might wander, Sasha comes totally undone whenever her boyfriend isn’t looking at her in a way that makes her feel truly seen — especially if Jesse is looking at someone else, like Darcy, his best friend’s girlfriend. Attention is Sasha’s lifeblood. If a butch isn’t looking at her, is she even there at all? Dykette turned me on and freaked me out in the best possible way! Imagine if Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? were recast with two generations of very-online queer folks. Tense, smart, and thrilling . . . with a charismatic pug named Vivienne to boot.”