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As an aside, this is an incredibly minor and personal pet peeve, but I do wish The Old Goat and the Alien had fewer explicit identity labels in it and that, well, that the aliens were more alien? (What do human genders or autism mean to aliens anyway? I'd like to know! This would be a very different book, so this is all less of a critique and more noticing how my brain is derailed by these questions.)

On the positive side, this book has an in-universe translator and so there's room to play with cultural differences. Avari can be "verian"--approximately but also not quite autistic. Jenna says that she is trans; Avari can reflect that they too are not the same gender they grew up with, but also that the connotations are different. Mostly, I wish there was even more cosmoran social worldbuilding for what this meant on Avari's end or what cosmoran gender even means.

Explicit identity labels to me often feel like telling instead of showing, and I worry a little about how dated a book will feel when the language merry-go-round settles on a different word five and then ten years from now. Also, it's not as if "being aromantic" or "being trans" or "being asexual" are precise terms; there's always a personal meaning and a partial-at-best mapping to these messy buckets. I'd rather have a character-building moment to subjectively describe these experiences and how it's affected them rather than to pull out an identity label as a shorthand, especially in a fictional universe.

The Old Goat and the Alien is a cozy, fluffy scifi novel that is largely inwardly focused on character growth and interpersonal conflict. It's also hella queer. This book is exactly the soft hug I expected it to be.

The main plot hook is that grumpy, goat-shape Avari inadvertantly becomes the host for the newly arrived "alien" (human) Jenna who shows up through a portal with no resources and no friends. This book has a confetti grab-bag of genders and trans and queer and disability flavors. I love love the gift economy. I also super appreciate the detail of having a major side character be a plural system that is chimera-shaped.

A story with this many identities also creates so much space for nuance; there's different kinds of disability accommodations, there's two very different ways of being autistic, there's many different ways of being trans.

(also Tak! shoutout in the thanks section??)