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3.5 

The Default World

By Naomi Kanakia
The Default World by Naomi Kanakia digital book - Fable

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Publisher Description

A trans woman sets out to exploit a group of wealthy roommates, only to fall under the spell of their glamorous, hedonistic lifestyle in tech-bubble San Francisco.

Years after fleeing San Francisco and getting sober, Jhanvi has made a life for herself working at a grocery co-op and saving for her surgeries. But when her friend (and sometimes more) Henry mentions that he and his techie festival-goer friends spent $100,000 to transform a warehouse basement into a sex dungeon, Jhanvi starts wondering if there’s a way to exploit these gullible idiots. She returns to San Francisco, hatching a plan to marry Henry for his company’s generous healthcare benefits.

Jhanvi enters a world of beautiful, decadent fire eaters and their lavish sex parties. But as her pretensions to cynicism and control start to fade, she develops a Gatsbyesque attraction to these happy young people and their bold claims of unconditional love. But do any of her privileged new friends really like or accept her? Her financial needs expose the limits of a community built on limitless self-expression, and soon she has to choose between doing what’s right, and doing what’s right for her.

This darkly funny novel skewers privileged leftist millennial tech culture, and asks whether "found family" is just another of the 21st-century's broken promises.

8 Reviews

3.5
“I’d like to thank Wunderkind PR for sending me an ARC of The Default World from Feminist Press. These opinions are my own. The Default World takes an extremely raw, honest look at the struggles of Jhanvi, a trans woman so desperate for gender affirming surgeries that she will do anything. She’s willing to compromise her morals and lose herself completely if it means she will look the way she feels and finally be accepted for who she is. Reading this book and thinking about how real these feelings are for so many people is absolutely heartbreaking, and I couldn’t help but root for Jhanvi even though she was an anti-heroine who lied to and manipulated the people around her. 

Of course, it helped that the people around her were mostly garbage. One of my favorite things about The Default World is that it highlights the extreme hypocrisy of performative activists. People who are typically privileged, rich, white, and pretend to care about underprivileged people while they actually look down on them. They are very loudly offended on behalf of marginalized groups (even when asked not to be) and they say all kinds of pretty things but when it comes down to actually helping someone in need, they suddenly have all kinds of excuses. It’s slacktivism at its finest, and Naomi Kanakia calls it out brilliantly. I fully enjoyed The Default World as a work of fiction, but it also taught me so much more than I knew about the trans experience. Jhanvi read like a very real person, and being inside her head was eye-opening. This book has absolutely inspired be to look into more nonfiction on the subject.”

About Naomi Kanakia

NAOMI KANAKIA is the author of three YA novels and a nonfiction book, What’s So Great about Great Books. Her stories, poetry, and essays have been published in American Short Fiction, Asimov’s, Gulf Coast, LitHub, and others. She has an MFA from Johns Hopkins and received the Lambda Literary Emerging Writers Fellowship in 2016. She lives in San Francisco with her wife and daughter.

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