At once a love letter and challenge to the traditional transgender memoir, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars is a playful, surrealist dance through queer coming of age.
A haunted young girl (who happens to be a kung-fu expert and pathological liar) runs away from an oppressive city, where the sky is always grey, in search of love and sisterhood—and finds herself in a magical place known only as the Street of Miracles. There, she is quickly adopted into a vigilante gang of glamorous warrior femmes called the Lipstick Lacerators, whose mission is to scour the Street of violent men and avenge murdered trans women everywhere. But when disaster strikes, can our intrepid heroine find the truth within herself in order to protect her new family and heal her broken heart?
"Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars seeks to shatter the traditional transgender memoir narrative and turn it on its head. The book is high-energy and full of exciting tension from the outset, and the writing keeps you glued to the page." —Britni de la Cretaz, Teen Vogue
"Thom’s novel is able to get at the truth of how trans femmes of color, and perhaps trans femmes and trans women generally, build and maintain communities without reducing those experiences to statistics, to straightforward politics, or even to 'factual' generic conventions of autobiography. Instead, she confabulates, eschewing conventions which demand the truth of the matter." —Avery Everhart, Michigan Quarterly Review
"With Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars, you really get the sense of creativity and invention that comes from becoming your own woman - an artist of your own identity." —Emma Watson, Our Shared Shelf book club announcement
"A captivating tale of betrayal, murder, mysticism, legend and compassion." —Luna Merbruja, Autostraddle
"Fierce Femmes is thrilling, fabulous, inventive." —Spencer Quong, The Paris Review
Kai Cheng Thom is a writer, performer, somatics practitioner, lasagna lover and wicked witch based in tkaronto. Kai Cheng is the author of several award-winning books, including I HOPE WE CHOOSE LOVE, an essay collection on the topic of Transformative Justice, and the novel Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl's Confabulous Memoir.
