A Shore Thing
1888. Muriel Pendrake is in St. Ives, Cornwall, studying seaweeds. Happily, the cyclist she collides with is the very artist she wants to illustrate her specimens for a career-making lecture in New York. Kit Griffith has been living as his true self in St. Ives, but he’s been artistically blocked ever since his best friend Lucy took his transition as a betrayal of their Sisterhood of female artists. To win Kit’s artistic support, Muriel takes a bet to pedal around Cornwall with a group of misogynist cyclists calling themselves the Mutton Wheelers, but as she fearlessly rises to the challenges of weather, landscape, and the wounds of their individual pasts, she worries that Kit doesn’t see the future she wants with him.
The book leans in on the jaunty, slapstick humor of its beginning, but smooths out into compelling emotional tension as the journey begins and Kit and Muriel spend real time together. Lowell, drawing on her lived experience, tenderly and brilliantly captures the way Kit and Muriel navigate each other and the vocabulary and conventions of their world as a trans man and queer woman. There’s a riotously fun scene with a sapphist society and a takedown of toxic masculinity among debates of gender conventions and colonial appropriation, all of which are handled well.
The leads’ career ambitions fall away as the action turns to the exquisite pleasure they give one another, but after all, this is a romance, with a promising pairing between their respective male friends emerging as Muriel and Kit fall in love. Readers won’t need to be an enthusiast of cycling, Cornwall, or seaweed to be swept up in this passionate love story and Lowell’s wonderful prose. Recommended.
