Before I get to my review, I’m going to start with a reminder about my strong belief in adhering to the principles of being fair and honest in my reviews. Jay Northcote’s Starting from Scratch is not my first exposure to the author, but it is my first time reading a romance novel in which the pairing involves a transgender person. Because of this, I feel it’s important to state that whenever I rate and review a book, I base them entirely on the merits of the book not the gender identification or sexual orientation of the characters it contains. As a member of the LGBTQ+ community, I am thrilled to see that stories involving characters from the lesser-represented shades of the rainbow are beginning to be written more. So as much as I was hoping to be able to give this book a much higher rating, I also strive to ensure my ratings are not affected (neither positively nor negatively) by my personal views on the topics presented within the novel.

The story in Starting from Scratch revolves almost completely around Ben, a trans man who has transitioned through hormone therapy and chest surgery so that his external presentation matches his internal gender. The title, then, is a clear reference to the fact that, with his new body allowing him to be the person he always should have been, he is essentially doing just that. Even though the physical issues of transitioning are generally no longer a problem, the mental and emotional demons that leave him isolated out of fear of how people will react to his secret continue to be a challenge. But he knows that if he’s ever going to find a supportive group of people outside his immediate family, especially one that he could fall in love with, he’ll need to set aside his insecurities. So when Sid, an ex-hookup of one of Ben’s housemates, starts making advances, the idea of having the chance to be with a man for the first time since his transition both exhilarates and terrifies Ben.

Considering the limited amount of romantic literature involving trans men, and the incompleteness of my own knowledge about their struggles, I was pleased that the author made no assumption that his readers would understand both the terminology that forms the reality of trans people and their potentially crippling gender dysphoria, the distress a person suffers based on the sex and gender of their birth. As such, this story could well be a projection of the author’s own experiences in being transgender, and the portions of the book that deal with the issues trans men go through—everything from the physical things necessary to succeed in presenting as a man to the obsession society has about what “parts” a person has in their pants and from the logistics of a sexual relationship where these parts may not match what their partner may be experienced with to suggestions for how a supportive person should approach such sensitive topics in conversation—felt to my undereducated mind as not only realistic but authentically personal without imparting a heavy, depressing tone to the story.

As great as I feel about the author’s presentation of what being transgender is like, though, I wish the story and the storytelling had been as satisfying to me as a reader. Outside the journey of Ben’s sexual reawakening as he deals with his insecurities, the story is almost completely without relationship conflict, and there is little provided that evokes feelings based on the struggle Ben goes through. While the reader is told, for example, of some past rejections and ugliness Ben has endured in trying to navigate his way back into the dating scene with his new body, only once is the reader shown an instance of someone unknowingly saying something that makes Ben feel ashamed to be trans. To be fair, the author repeatedly shows how Ben’s fear of having his secret exposed and ridiculed is a very real day-to-day concern of his, but instances of Ben being made to feel less of a man, intentionally or not, are unfortunately few. Having read a couple of this author’s books before, I understand that his writing style is typically low in angst and conflict, but as I’ve said in reviews of other books of this style, the lack of such things makes it harder for me to get the strong feels I crave when reading a romance.

Unfortunately, the book also suffers from a terrible case of enumerating dull day-to-day stuff that serves no purpose in furthering the plot. While I expect there to be brief scenes showing the everyday minutiae of living as a background for the little conversations during the getting-to-know-you-phase of a romance, Starting from Scratch would have been a much tighter story, in my opinion, if this hadn’t been so prominent throughout the book. Granted, this would have turned the novel into a long novella instead, but other books in the same series are novellas, so that should not have been a problem. It gave me the impression that Ben and his housemates, whose stories have been told earlier in the series, have lives as unremarkable as your everyday Joe. I don’t need the characters to do exciting thing like skydiving constantly, but I also don’t need to see so much of the everyday hum-drum that I try to escape by reading in the first place.

Maybe, though, this is a necessary part of the infancy of trans romances, this showing that trans people aren’t any different from anyone else. Whether or not that was his intent in writing Starting from Scratch, it didn’t work quite as well as I was hoping for it to do. And while I’m starting to sense a pattern in reading Jay Northcote’s books that sometimes they scratch an itch while other times they just frustrate me by pointing out I have one, I truly applaud him for writing this book, and I hope it will not only add to the base of people who pick up trans romances (and trans literature in general) but increase the acceptance of trans people in world society. One step at a time.

The author and/or publisher generously provided me a complimentary copy of Starting from Scratch in exchange for this fair and honest review.