BookBrowse Reviews Woodworking by Emily St. James

BookBrowse:

Journalist and screenwriter Emily St. James debuts with a big-hearted novel about community, support, and self-acceptance, focusing on a trans woman in small-town South Dakota.

This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For access to our digital magazine, free books,and other benefits, become a member today.

Erica Skyberg is a popular English teacher and long-time community theater director, preparing to put on a production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. She's more or less a pillar of the community, even if she prefers to keep a low profile. The only problem? No one in her town of Mitchell, South Dakota knows who Erica is. Everyone, including her students, the high school's conservative principal, and her ex-wife Constance, starring as Emily in the play, knows Erica by a different name, and sees her in the body of a man. But, as Erica has known on some level her whole life and has finally admitted within the past few years, she's actually a woman.

The year is 2016, contentious presidential and local election campaigns—focused in no small part on "culture wars" and bathroom bills—are being fiercely waged, and South Dakota is overwhelmingly conservative. Erica doesn't feel safe coming out to just anyone, but she knows exactly one other transgender person. The only issue? That person is her seventeen-year-old student Abigail.

Abigail is a recent transfer to Mitchell High, where she's always been out as a trans girl. She's lived with her older sister ever since her parents kicked her out after learning that she was secretly purchasing black-market hormones. Abigail has plenty of her own self-doubts and fantasizes about escaping somewhere like Minneapolis or Chicago, where she can "get my surgeries and change my name and never, ever tell anybody else again. I'll be like any other girl you pass on the street. You'd never know." Nevertheless, she comes off as unapologetically bold and confident in her own skin, unafraid to stick up for herself. Which is how—after she calls a group of classmates "fascist cunts" for ridiculing another girl's support for Hillary Clinton—she lands in after-school detention, which just happens to be supervised by Erica Skyberg.

Erica tentatively, almost desperately comes out to Abigail—who urges Erica to take tiny steps like painting her nails—and the two gradually embark on a supportive friendship. In many ways, their power dynamic is reversed—Erica is plagued by uncertainty and second-guesses her desire to eventually live as a woman, while Abigail provides pep talks and connections to resources. Mitchell is a small town, though, and the amount of time a teacher and student spend together outside of school, especially when they appear to be different genders, attracts attention and raises more than a few red flags. Erica is terrified about what will happen when she reveals her true self to the people in her life—but although it's anything but easy, doing so results in surprising new connections and an ever-widening network of support.

Author Emily St. James—a journalist and a television screenwriter—knows the world of which she writes, as a trans woman who, according to her author bio, "grew up...in the wilds of red-state America." The trans characters' attempts to find and build their own support network, as well as their genuine (and in many cases, fully justified) fears of coming out in an environment that is unfriendly at best and terrifyingly unsafe at worst, feel authentic, and although the trajectory for most characters is positive, that's definitely not the case for everyone. Erica's gradual, halting, and sometimes messy process of transitioning also rings true, a much bigger undertaking than "simply" publicly affirming your gender: "To say 'I'm a woman' is simply to lump yourself in with another four billion or so people. It's another thing altogether to figure out who you are, and that is where Erica keeps getting tripped up."

Abigail, too, has her journey—at the novel's opening she fantasizes about passing as a cis woman in a totally new setting (a phenomenon known in the trans community as "woodworking"). Once she encounters another woman whose decades-long life in the woodwork has locked her in fear, prevented from fully realizing and celebrating her new identity, she comes to embrace a different outlook, appreciating the need for trans people to acknowledge, recognize, and support one another. That spirit of affirmation suffuses the whole novel. Erica's first inkling that she might be trans is a joyful revelation: "She imagined, for the first time, that her body was not a tomb to die in but a foundation to build upon." Even though the novel fully acknowledges that many coming-out stories end in terror or tragedy, and even though the author's note soberingly spells out how life for trans people in America has actually become more dangerous since 2016, both Erica's and Abigail's stories point toward promising futures, ones that readers will fervently cheer for them to realize.

This review first ran in the March 26, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.