Tomboyland: Essays

"Melissa Faliveno has lived in Brooklyn for more than a decade now and has witnessed how “especially after the 2016 election … people on the coast began to talk about Midwesterners as if they were nothing more than uneducated, gun-toting rednecks.” She complicates and nuances this narrative in Tomboyland, a collection of essays that are a love letter to, reckoning with and examination of her Midwestern upbringing in Wisconsin. To have roots, Faliveno implies, is to have the ability to grow upward, out and sometimes away, but to always have a context to return to."