I enjoyed it. I made an effort to read Key genderlessly. This didn’t work at first, probably because I found the Spivak pronouns quite hard to get used to, and “ey” came out as quite male to me, then fairly suddenly flipped to female somewhere around the point where ey was playing on the swing with Trellis. I think this may have been because Trellis came out a little more strongly male to me by comparison (although I was also making a conscious effort to read ey genderlessly). But as the story wore on, I improved at getting rid of the gender and by the end I no longer felt sure of either Key or Trellis.
Point of criticism: I didn’t find the shift between what was (to me) rather obviously the two halves of the story very smooth. The narrative form appeared to take a big step backwards from Key after the words “haze of flour” and never quite get back into eir shoes. Perhaps that was intentional, because there’s obviously a huge mood shift, but it left me somewhat dissatisfied about the resolution of the story. I felt as though I still didn’t know what had actually happened to the original Key character.
I enjoyed it. I made an effort to read Key genderlessly. This didn’t work at first, probably because I found the Spivak pronouns quite hard to get used to, and “ey” came out as quite male to me, then fairly suddenly flipped to female somewhere around the point where ey was playing on the swing with Trellis. I think this may have been because Trellis came out a little more strongly male to me by comparison (although I was also making a conscious effort to read ey genderlessly). But as the story wore on, I improved at getting rid of the gender and by the end I no longer felt sure of either Key or Trellis.
Point of criticism: I didn’t find the shift between what was (to me) rather obviously the two halves of the story very smooth. The narrative form appeared to take a big step backwards from Key after the words “haze of flour” and never quite get back into eir shoes. Perhaps that was intentional, because there’s obviously a huge mood shift, but it left me somewhat dissatisfied about the resolution of the story. I felt as though I still didn’t know what had actually happened to the original Key character.