Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s sequence of novels A Red Heart of Memories (1999), Past the Size of Dreaming (2001), and A Stir of Bones (2003) may be of interest to this site’s readers for one major transgendered character, who is onstage in Past the Size of Dreaming and A Stir of Bones and appears in flashbacks in in A Red Heart of Memories. Several other characters are more or less atypical in their gender identity and presentation. Hoffman has also written a number of short stories about the characters from these books, some but not all of which are in her short story collection Permeable Borders.

A Red Heart of Memories begins with the meeting of two homeless people. Matt (Matilda) Black is better off than the average homeless person because of her magical talent, which is to converse with the spirits of man-made objects. She can, for instance, talk to trash cans and dumpsters and ask them if they have any unspoiled food that would be safe for her to scavenge, and ask unoccupied houses if they wouldn’t mind unlocking for her and letting her spend the night when it’s cold out. She can use her talent to repair appliances and cars, and could theoretically settle down and get a steady job of that kind — but she has such a deep-seated wanderlust that she can’t stand to hold a job and live in one place for very long, and she gets along better with “inanimate” objects than with people. She also has a kind of passive telepathic ability, to see people’s mental images.

Edmund Reynolds is a witch; he talks to things as well, but mostly to the spirits of natural things, animals and trees and rocks. He follows Spirit, going here and there and trying to make things better through judicious use of magic — cleaning up the pollution in a lake, for instance. When Matt meets him, he’s just finished repairing a crumbling wall in a pioneer cemetery by dint of merging with it for several months. He wants to help her, and she’s distrustful at first, saying she doesn’t need help. But after she talks to his car and learns more about him, she lets her guard down, and they become friends.

Edmund has been wandering for years; there’s a period of time in his life, between his teenage years when he first gained his power, and his adult years as a wanderer, that he can’t remember. Some kind of trauma is blocking him from remembering why he left his hometown and became this wanderer. After meeting Matt, he decides to visit his hometown for the first time in about fifteen years and start tracking down his childhood circle of friends, partly to see if they can help him remember.

This quest to find Edmund’s friends and recover his lost memories, and then to deal with the consequences of that, fills A Red Heart of Memories and Past the Size of Dreaming. The first book ends with fairly good closure, Edmund having found two of his lost friends and recovered his lost memories; but there are two other friends to track down, and Past the Size of Dreaming begins shortly after the end of the first book as Matt and Edmund start looking for them. One of them is the transgendered character I mentioned above. It’s hard to talk about their character arc much without spoilers; even telling you in advance that one of the characters is transgendered is a kind of spoiler. Their transition is offstage, in backstory; we never learn all the details, but there are a couple of interesting conversations where they talk about their change and the reasons for it with the friends they haven’t seen in fifteen years.

A Stir of Bones is a prequel, set about twenty years before the other two, when Edmund and his friends are about thirteen. It’s from the point of view of Susan, one of the viewpoint characters of A Red Heart of Memories, and shows how she met Edmund and the others and how they helped her through a severe crisis. It stands alone well, but I think one would appreciate it more having read the others first. Sometimes I re-read the books in publication order and sometimes in internal chronological order. I think you could read either A Red Heart of Memories or A Stir of Bones first, but you should definitely read A Red Heart of Memories before Past the Size of Dreaming. A Stir of Bones was published as YA, while the others were published as adult novels, but I think all of them would appeal to the same readers.

Hoffman writes beautifully, and her characters are wonderfully real, complex and sympathetic. The personalities of the things that Matt talks to, and her conversations with them, are charming and often funny without being played for laughs. The way magic is presented in these books is another marvel; Matt’s magic works very differently from Edmund’s, and each is different in turn from several other forms of magic used by other characters. And though it’s not a thoroughly worked out “magic system,” of the kind some fantasy writers treat like an alternate system of physics, it still makes emotional sense; all the different forms of magic feel like part of the same coherent world.

I love these books to pieces and I re-read them every few years. I’ve just finished re-reading the novels, and I’m reading (in some cases re-reading) the stories in Permeable Borders now; Hoffman is not quite as good at short stories as at novels, I think, but they’re very good too.

A few of Hoffman’s other works have involved transgender elements. The Thread that Binds the Bones (1993), her first novel, has an important transgender transformation subplot, and the short story “Unleashed” in her earlier collection Time Travelers, Ghosts and Other Visitors is about a woman cursed to transform into a man on the night of the full moon. (The promisingly titled Body Switchers from Outer Space (1996) is a fun read, but only involves one same-sex body swap if I recall correctly.) I’ll probably review The Thread that Binds the Bones here whenever I re-read it next.

• Wikipedia article on Nina Kiriki Hoffman
• Jo Walton's review of A Red Heart of Memories and sequels
• Jo Walton's review of Permeable Borders

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