92 pages • 3 hours read
Dashka SlaterA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
In “Tumbling,” Slater quotes from Sasha’s Tumblr page, a social media site which encourages long-form entries and attracts quirky or off-beat writing. In the post, Sasha alternates between silly statements, such as “Of course I like hats/anyone who doesn’t is wrong” (11) and more serious comments, such as, “If the whole world was listening, I might just/rant about a bunch of things like gender/wealth inequality/why school is important” (12). Slater presents this section without comment.
“Pronouns” describes Sasha’s early fascination with language, the way they began reading at a young age, and how, at the age of 6, Sasha made her own language: “It was called Astrolinguish and it was the language of Sasha’s home planet, Astrolingua” (14). Slater explains how some languages have the notion of gender, while others do not; Sasha’s invented languages “distinguished between animate and inanimate objects” (14). Slater explains that Sasha prefers the gender-neutral pronoun “they,” and addresses the reader directly: “you’ll get used to it” (15).
“1001 Blank White Cards” starts with Sasha’s wish list for their 16th birthday: “an accordion, a manual typewriter, a Soviet flag, and a new Rubik’s Cube” (16), then segues into a portrait of Sasha, starting with a physical description and then stopping to note that Sasha had been diagnosed with “Asperger’s, a form of autism, which can make them awkward socially” (17).
By Dashka Slater