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Description of  Cactus Country: A Boyhood Memoir [Audiobook]

B0CR1XNDTX M4B@64 kbps A Striking Memoir Of Genderfluidity, Class, And The American Southwest. Newly arrived in the Sonoran Desert, eleven-year-old Zo enters a world of giant beetles, thundering javelinas, and gnarled palo verde trees. In Cactus Country RV Park, Zo has been given a fresh start and a shorter new haircut. Although Zo doesn't have the words to express it, he experiences life as a trans boyand here, others begin to see him as a boy, too. Zo spends hot days chasing shade and freight trains with an ever-rotating pack of sunburned desert kids, and nights fending off his own questions about the body underneath his baggy clothes. As Zo enters adolescence, he must reckon with the sexism, racism, substance abuse, and violence endemic to the working-class men he's grown close to, whose hard masculinity seems as embedded in the desert landscape as the cacti sprouting from parched earth. In response, Zo adopts an androgynous style and new pronouns, but still cannot escape what it means to live in a gendered body, particularly when a fraught first love destabilizes their sense of self. But beauty flowers in this desert, too. Zo persists in searching for answers, dreaming of a day they might leave the park behind to embrace whatever awaits beyond. Equal parts harsh and tender, Cactus Country is a precisely rendered journey of self-determination that will resonate with anyone who's ever had to fight to be themself.