Review: Transition Assistance (A Review Of Woodworking by Emily St. James)

By Hugh Blanton

 

If social media (or the NPR newsroom) is any guide, America is in the throes of the most vicious culture war in its history. Culture critic and author Emily St. James said in a March 2025 interview in Electric Literature, "Let's say at this moment, we are entering a totalitarian fascism period that lasts for the rest of our lives, for the rest of my kid's life. A lot of people in those situations who try to do good are obliterated. Either they have their lives destroyed, or they are literally killed." She's sounding the alarm on what she believes the ramifications are for the results of the 2024 USA elections. St. James decided to write a novel about it, and it opens up with a high school trans girl, Abigail Hawkes, being sent to detention for calling her classmates "a bunch of fascists cunts." And so the tone is set for the rest of the book.

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Woodworking is Emily St. James's debut novel. Set in Mitchell, South Dakota, during the 2016 election season, a high school trans girl (Abigail Hawkes) reluctantly guides a thirty-something mustachioed English teacher (Erica Skyberg) along to becoming an openly transgender woman. Erica is not known as Erica to anybody but herself, and we the readers, do not know how other people refer to her when they call her by her first name because it has been deleted by a gray rectangle on the page whenever it comes up. Known as a deadname, the graying out is a gimmick St. James uses that is quite annoying when one first comes across it, wondering if there has been a printing error. Erica is recently divorced from her wife (yes, I know, this pronoun gendering is confusing, but please, try to stick with me) Constance, who does not know that Erica is, or wants to be, a transgender woman.

 

Part public relations for the LGBT community, part novel, Woodworking is in sync with the current trends of fiction today—mentioning Donald Trump no less than eight times along with a nod or two to climate change.  Megan Osborne, a student in Mitchell High School where Erica teaches, forms a student group to promote democracy. Megan is a fan of the liberal dark horse candidate Helen Swee running for a senate seat against conservative bogeyman Isaiah Rose (notice the character name choices St. James gives her hero and villain—Swee (how sweet!) for hero, and Old Testament Isaiah for the Bible-thumping incumbent conservative villain). Megan is also a friend of Abigail, and Abigail suspects Megan is only friends with her because liberal Megan wants to have a transgender friend for its coolness factor. Neither of them are old enough to vote, but they do their best to rally support for their hopeless candidate.

 

Being St. James's first attempt at a novel, the prose isn't really all that bad, especially considering it's a "message" novel (she even works in abortion, too). There are still a few clunkers about: "Abigail was too overcome with laughter to do anything but let out great gulps of it." "Erica felt a stabbing loneliness." "A man built like a frozen can of pop..." "electric pale skin." "Erica's sandwich somersaulted in her stomach." "Megan nods loudly." "she laughed like a balloon leaking air." (Wouldn't that be more like a fart?) Erica keeping her mustache until late in the novel makes the reader question just how dedicated Erica is to becoming a transgender woman, and in fact there is a part in the novel where Erica seems to be giving up on the idea of becoming a woman, but the reader can easily detect that no such surrender is in the works as St. James continues with the grayed-out deadname gimmick. The "blow up" scenes are poorly contrived (and too many!) including one where Erica is being taken out clothes shopping but flies into a rage when asked to try on an item of clothing and stomps off in a huff to the food court. And of course the rules of grammar are irritatingly flouted when singular characters use they/them pronouns. (Built like a frozen can of pop?)

 

Clothing fetishism and transgenderism often cozy up together, where one is found the other is usually nearby:

 

This was the moment, the test. Erica clutched the dress. It was lovely, and its starchy fabric had a surprisingly welcoming quality. She wanted so desperately to put it on and wanted desperately to throw it in the nearby trash can and walk out of the store and out of the mall and drive home...Now that she wasn't holding the dress, Erica badly wanted to be holding the dress again.

 

The clothing fetishism of course works its way into the sex scenes, too. Erica and Constance in a public restroom for a quickie: "She covered Constance's mouth with her own, then softly reached beneath Constance's blouse to cover her breast with her hand, thumb rubbing against the lace of Constance's bra." This sounds like something Danielle Steel would write in the middle of the night while drunk on Moscato.

 

The chapters alternate between third-person narration for Erica and first-person narration for Abigail. (Late in the book we get second-person narration chapters for Brooke, a co-director of a play that she is working on with Erica.) The first mention of Trump comes at page nine, by page eleven Erica has already cried three times. Abigail, who colors her hair vibrant colors, is weary over all the questions she gets about being transgender and she has stock and ready witty answers which only come off as rude and snobbish when she delivers them. Nearly everybody in the book is seeing a therapist. St. James said that "I really did not want to write a political treatise." Not only is Woodworking a political treatise, it's a poorly contrived one straight out of the worst of what the social media universe has to offer. When fiction is written by people who have very little real-life experience outside their own social bubble, it comes off as, well, fiction.

Hugh Blanton's latest book is Kentucky Outlaw. He can be reached on X: @HughBlanton5