This seems to be my summer for reading. I just finished Penny Aimes’ For the Love of April French and I have to say it’s a winner.

The book follows a couple that meets in a bar catering to BDSM. April is a transgender submissive and Dennis is a meticulous dom. Not being in that lifestyle, I found the BDSM aspect a bit distracting. But I did learn a lot about why it is appealing, even if I cared a lot more about their relationship as simply man and trans woman. To be fair, there is an interesting interplay between the two.

April, herself, is a study in contradiction, not convincingly female enough to pass as a woman yet mesmerizingly beautiful enough to attract Dennis’s devoted love, fearful and unsure of her worth yet brave and courageous in her ability to trust her dom and to live life as a trans woman. But more than all that April is me. She is so many trans women who are not quite sure of themselves or their place in the world or in relationships, or whether they are worthy of love.

Then there is Dennis, a man with all the power and freedom. He has money and authority in his work and he’s a dom. But his heart is vulnerable too. He needs her as much as she needs him, and it is a beautiful thing to watch them figure things out.

If I had any quibble about the book, it was that the author seemed to be trying to make something of the fact that April is white and Dennis is black. I don’t have a problem with the idea, but I thought it was done ineffectively. More than that, for all the things this book made me feel, I never really got a sense of what either Dennis or April looked like (despite a photo of her on the cover) or came off like, or a sense of why they were initially physically attracted to each other. It almost made me put down the book.

But I’m glad I persevered.

I fell in love with April. Then I fell in love with Dennis. And I was just rooting for their happiness. And I was glad to have another book that gives us trans girls a nice story to dream might be about us, to see ourselves in a happily-ever-after romance.