Ivan Coyote wrote ten books before this one, and the description reaches for the word storyteller well before it reaches for author. That ordering matters on an audiobook page, because Coyote reads this collection themselves. Audible Studios released it in August 2017, a little over five hours of memoir told in separate stories rather than chapters, covering a tomboy childhood in Canada's Yukon and the decades of not fitting into any available box that followed it. The book took a Stonewall Book Award Honor.
The First Time Mistaken for a Boy
One October 2016 reader calls Coyote their favorite storyteller and explains the appeal precisely: personal experience delivered as though the two of you were lifelong friends swapping yarns from your youth. That reader is describing prose on a page, having spent an entire unplanned day inside it, and singles out a simple conversational tone as the quality that pulls a stranger in. On a recording read by the author, that quality is the entire proposition rather than a nice detail.
Told in stories is the operative phrase, and it changes what a buyer is getting. The firsts that organize the book are discrete and self-contained: the first time Coyote was mistaken for a boy, the first time they deliberately abandoned a bikini top to swim with the boys at the local pool, the first time they were chastised for using the women's washroom. Each finishes on its own terms. Nothing accumulates into a plot, and no story requires you to hold the previous one in mind. That makes it forgiving of interruption and slightly resistant to momentum, which is a trade worth knowing about in advance.
Coyote Is the Storyteller the Description Names
Coyote reading their own material is the most defensible version of an author-narration credit. This is not an expert lending authority to a subject, and not a familiar name trading on recognition. It is the storyteller the description names, reading first-person stories about their own life. The Yukon childhood supplies the specificity, a small northern town where difference registers instantly, and the adult sections supply the range, with Coyote offering advice to younger people while still asking older ones for guidance. The two halves talk to each other across the collection without either being framed as the wiser one.
A Window Into a World Foreign to Many
Restraint is what a March 2017 five-star reader identifies as the book's real strength. That reader describes a difficult, emotional read that presents one person's struggle for normalcy and simple dignity without politics attached and without pleading with anybody, and says outright that it never lectures. What it offers instead, in their words, is a window into a world foreign to many, one that invites empathy and compassion rather than demanding either. They finished it still processing what they had read.
Five hours delivered in discrete pieces makes this among the more approachable memoirs on the LGBTQ+ shelf. Nothing requires prior reading, no theoretical vocabulary gets assumed, and the humor arrives regularly enough to carry the harder passages without strain. Directions for building your own unicorn trap sit in the same collection as being ordered out of a public washroom, and that tonal range is a deliberate structural choice rather than an accident of assembly.
Nothing about the subject has aged out of relevance, which cannot be said of every memoir from 2017. Coyote's project is carving out room for people who do not fit neatly into boxes, identities or labels, and the specific pressures described here, the washroom, the swimming pool, the endless low-grade explaining, have not eased in the years since. Anyone planning to hand this to a young person will find it does the work without ever raising its voice at them.
A Unicorn Trap You Cannot See by Ear
An August 2017 reader, four stars, flags what they call a few quirky moments in the middle that a listener may or may not connect with, while insisting they take nothing away from the message or the power of the book. That is an accurate note to sound. A collection built from separate stories will always contain some that land less well for any given person, and by that reader's account the ones least likely to connect are clustered in the middle stretch.
Building instructions in the description deserve a practical flag. The book includes directions for building your very own unicorn trap, which is a delightful thing to find inside a memoir and an awkward thing to receive by ear. Instructions want to be seen, returned to and followed at whatever pace suits you, and no note here indicates whether the recording treats that section any differently. Plan to enjoy it rather than to use it.
Most of this pool arrived ahead of the recording. October 2016, January 2017 and March 2017 all sit in front of an August 2017 release date, which puts three responses out of five on a printed edition. One of them describes a habit worth thinking about: carrying the book around in a bag for months, taking one story here and one story there, savoring each for its own flavor. A continuous recording does not permit that pattern, and something in the collection does change when it gets consumed in two sittings instead of twenty.
Declining to Argue Is the Whole Method
Young people working out where they fit are the audience Coyote most clearly writes toward, and the book earns that trust by refusing to instruct anybody. Adults who grew up as tomboys, as young butches, or simply as the wrong kind of girl in a small town will recognize the Yukon material immediately, and the recognition arrives with no requirement that they reached the same conclusions Coyote eventually did. Nothing in the book insists on a destination, which is precisely what makes it usable by people still in motion.
Parents, teachers and anyone with a queer or questioning kid in their life have a practical reason to listen. The book models the tone that particular conversation needs: curious, funny, unembarrassed, and specific about small humiliations rather than large abstractions. Anyone who found Gender Failure, written with Rae Spoon, or One in Every Crowd useful already knows the register, since the description names both as Coyote's earlier work.
Collections behave like collections, so anybody after a linear memoir with a single rising arc should look elsewhere. Anyone who wants an argument rather than an invitation will finish unsatisfied too, since declining to argue is the whole method. Coyote spends the collection telling you what happened and leaving you to decide what it means, which is a rarer and considerably harder thing than it sounds.
Questions Listeners Ask
What if the opening of this audiobook does not click?
Give it a while. One November 2024 reader, five stars, describes feeling completely lost when the book began, then finding that the writing suddenly clicked and the words started landing. That reader went on to send copies to friends in the Midwest for their trans kids, and ordered a printed copy afterward to keep for rereading.
Is this audiobook suitable for a teenager?
Yes, and it appears written partly with them in mind. Coyote's earlier collection One in Every Crowd is described as a book for LGBT youth, and this one offers advice to young people directly. No content advisory appears on the page, and the difficult material here is social rather than graphic.
