No simple answers in search for self-acceptance

The subject of a great love story should first and foremost be the love you hold for yourself — how can you respect and connect with others if the one you see in the mirror is not yet a person you’d like to be?

First-time novelist Sam K MacKinnon is from our very own Winnipeg, with prior publications having appeared in Prairie Fire, Them and others. MacKinnon pens characters which feel like they could be from this reviewer’s inner circle — maybe pals from grad school, or at a dead-end retail job, or even a LGBTTQ+ app during the pandemic.

The narrative’s backdrop is set in present-day Winnipeg. Restaurants, venues, and community organizations provide local colour; such familiar places are given new names like Toast or Rainbow Pride Center, thus lending a distinct layer of comfort that was not anticipated from the outset of a Winnipeg-centric novel.

What exactly is my body riddle? Lex seeks an answer to this titular question. As the potentiality to feel some semblance of certainty in self-identity gnaws away at them, Lex gets a call from the surgeon’s office confirming a date for their top surgery, which looms ominously on the horizon like a cumulonimbus — full of rain and imminent change — and carrying an answer of sorts, but one which is currently unknown and still in the making.

In part, Lex had hoped the security of the date would at the very least provide them with an overarching answer “with certainty” as to their gender and sexuality, but leading up to the top surgery, and also afterwards, Lex is troubled by the questions their body seems to pose.

Lex and partner Ada, meanwhile, are at odds in their relationship. They have been together for several years, living together as romantic partners, but at some point they reached a stasis in their sex life. Despite cohabitation and typically sleeping in the same bed together, they have not had sex with each other in well over a year. They are polyamorous, and while Ada occasionally sleeps with others, as of late Lex does not.

What was once a vibrant sex life with relative certainty in its dynamics for Lex and Ada (submissive and dominant, respectively) has now shifted — for the latter in particular, there’s a tense battle to reignite what was once a well-fuelled flame of passionate “love-making.”

But can they get back to what was lost? Or does transition transition everything for them?

The Body Riddle is a thoughtful, playful read which delivers a rich history from one character’s point of view on polyamorous love, friendship and community building.

While it doesn’t offer a how-to guide for solving the body riddle in question, it posits a blueprint for “how might one better understand themselves” — which is truly a question with the opportunity to be answered by infinite possibilities.

Riel Lynch is a bookseller and book blogger in Winnipeg.