A/S/L is a novel about growing up online in a time when the internet was a haven, not a hellhole of toxic masculinity and AI slop. It’s a love letter to early internet and the friends we make there; a story about 3 trans women who build a video game together in the 1990s, and find themselves drawn into one another’s real-life orbit decades later.

I haven’t read Thorton’s work before, but I’m a sucker for a story about the internet so this sounded right up my alley. I loved the mixed-media elements - Thornton makes use of emails, chat room logs, and technical writing over the course of the novel, as well as a mix of close third-person and second person narratives for the protagonists.

I switched between an e-book copy and the audiobook, and found it much more enjoyable in its physical form - the audio was a little hard to follow as there was one narrator for 3 points of view. That, and chatlogs will always sound weird when read aloud, lol.

The writing is so, so good here - particularly when exploring the darker and sadder emotions experienced by the characters. This is not a happy book! It’s also philosophical, in many ways, asking what we owe ourselves and one another against a backdrop of a capitalist hellscape. I loved these elements; the video game elements are obviously a big part of this one too, but they were lost on me (I am 31, so younger than the characters in the novel) though I do enjoy a novel about internet culture so I did find it fascinating.

Abraxa, Sash, and Lilith are all great characters and are all a little stuck on the game they promised to make together in the 1990s. This has impacted them all in different ways in the intervening 20 years. Lilith is working in a bank and has a sort-of girlfriend in Elspet, Sash is doing online sex work, and Abraxa, when we meet her, appears to be having a psychotic break. Their lives have deviated hugely but they’re drawn back together in ways that are unexpected.

Overall, this was a little too long for me, I think it would have been stronger as a shorter book. I’ve seen a lot of negative reviews regarding the coding and technical language, to which I say, grow up! Let it wash over you. Dense and difficult but ultimately well worth it.

Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for my free digital ARC! I read Jeanne Thornton’s Summer Fun back in 2023 and I absolutely loved it, so I was really excited to be approved for her latest offering on Netgalley. Unfortunately I found A/S/L to be lacking the spark I so loved in Summer Fun. I’m not sure if it’s because I’m just not a video game person, but I struggled a lot to maintain my interest during pretty much the first half of the book. The second half did pick up, but I’d go so far as to say the first half is a slog.

I did love the inclusion of emails and instant messaging threads - I was not in the internet in 1998, but in her afterword Thornton says she used real message archives to get the tone down and it shows. Some of the group text threads were EXCRUCIATING to read, perfectly encapsulating the feminine experience in male-dominated internet spaces. PhilippeDarke, a curse upon your family.

Sash, Lilith and Abraxa do sort of make up for the monotony of the video game aspects, especially Lilith and Sash. But sometimes the POVs (often using the second person) got blurred and confusing. It has so much potential but it feels just too stilted and bogged down in technicalities to garner more than 3 stars and I’m sad about it 😭

Publisher, editor and author Jeanne Thornton’s novel deals with fractured friendships and the complexities of navigating the world as a trans woman. Three queer teens Abraxa, Sash and Lilith meet online in the late nineties, the internet is still a new phenomenon, a space that enables a retreat from the everyday where they can immerse themselves in fantastical ways of being. They find CraftQ which allows them to design their own games, working on one together until something causes them to suddenly break away. Eighteen years later they’re no longer in touch, adults struggling to survive what life throws at them. Abraxa is homeless, gradually losing touch with reality, she retreats into her own version of her childhood game. Sash lives with her parents, online dominatrix gigs barely paying her way. Lilith has a more conventional existence working in a bank but even so everything around her feels on the verge of falling apart. Then, by chance the three cross paths.

Thornton’s inventive, often moving, story builds on online trans communities she encountered in her own youth. Her piece is suffused with intricate recreations of chat room talks, tech design and gaming culture. The structure’s partly inspired by Hironobu Sakaguchi et al’s 1990s RPG Final Fantasy VI. There are some wonderful passages particularly in the first half of the novel – I especially liked Lilith’s sections. But towards the end it started to feel stretched thin and slightly meandering, it could easily withstand substantial trimming. So, by no means perfect, yet a strangely compelling read that was more than worth the time.

Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Dead Ink

Rating: 3/3.5

As teens, Abraxa, Sash and Lilith were online friends and coworkers on the best video game to never be released; as adults, they lead verydifferent lives, unaware that they are all just miles apart. Lilith, perhaps the most 'well-adjusted' of the three, goes about her job as an underwriter trying her best to conform to cis, straight standards. Sash tries to find the correct answer for every social interaction, but only seems to succeed when moonlighting as a dominatrix. Abraxa's nomadic lifestyle has brought her to the basement of a dilapidated church, where she might finally flourish—or fall apart.

A/S/L is at once deeply intimate and wildly ambitious in scope, soaked in a nostalgia that serves as both a refuge from a steadily worsening present, and a leash tethering the characters to the worst mistakes of their past. The use of video game elements to structure the book was incredibly immersive, and the way each of them used these video game rules and analogies to structure their own lives felt like a natural extension of that. This book is quite long, and I definitely felt that length at points: there are several passages of pure, internalised narration that can be quite intense to get through, and the climactic moment takes a while to arrive. For the most part, I enjoyed the insight into these three women's lives, how they came together and apart, and how they shaped each other fundamentally, in good ways and bad, in a world which would rather not see them exist in any ways at all.

Thank you to NetGalley, Dead Ink Books and Jeanne Thornton for providing me with an e-ARC in exchange for my honest review!

This book was disappointing for me :( I was so excited reading the description but unfortunately, the formatting of this book made is so difficult to get into. So much of the early book was monotonous descriptions of coding which I did not expect. I wish the description was more informative of the mixed media format. The switching perspective without making it clear which character we were following was also so disorientating.

I feel bad rating it so low because the plot itself was something I could tell was enjoyable but the way this book was written was just extremely inaccessable to me. I'm sure many will connect to this novel but I just couldn't get into it, even after reading. Underwhelmed unfortunately!

This is a tricky book to review. A/S/L (an internet initialism for “age, sex, location’) is a story about videogames and three friends, and the code(s) they learn to survive. Jeanne Thornton does an incredible job with the characterization of each of the three protagonists. I enjoyed the unusual formatting of the text in some chapters—it reminded me how much fun and randomness there was in using IRC in the late ’90s and early 2000s.

This novel is heavy on character development, with no distinctive plot line—a risk when you have such niche characters. I found Abraxa, Sasha, and Lilith to be interesting, relatable characters. I enjoyed the first quarter of the book, with it dropping significantly until the final quarter. Perhaps A/S/L could have benefited from tighter editing—I felt it was about 80 to 100 pages longer than it needed to be. I appreciate the exploration of diverse, relevant themes for a young adult audience, such as addiction, sexuality, and identity.

Ultimately, A/S/L is a well-written novel with great trans representation, but it failed to resonate with me on a deeper level. This is not a book for everyone—it has many technicalities and bits of jargon that might not appeal to all.

Thank you, Jeanne Thornton and Dead Ink Books for this ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

i DNF this book, but felt like i needed to write a review due to the fact that i could have avoided this problem by being aware at all that this is not a very accessible book for the average reader. the story is told with and amongst a lot of tech and game design speak (as well as things like chat logs) and honestly unless you are already specifically a part of this tech/game design community, this could be very much unreadable for you like it was for me. the blurb for this book (at the time of writing, as i received an e-ARC) does not make it clear.

i know from other reviews that this type of writing lessens at the book goes on, but i couldn’t understand enough of it due to the story set-up being drowned in jargon to be able to wait it out and i am pretty bummed because i’m fairly certain i am missing out on a great story.

My thoughts on this book were mixed! I really loved the first act, focusing on the characters as children and how they interact with one another, their relationship to the internet and the way they rely on the making of their game for validation/happiness. Unfortunately, after this section passed, I felt less connected to the story. I could really appreciate the discussion of transgender issues, I found it really interesting. But the narrative fell a little flat for me after the characters become adults. I think I was expecting this section to take up more of the novel, but sadly did not. I would love to try to read this again in the future, but on this occasion I did not feel too connected to the story.

I loved this - a beautifully written, funny, deeply aching account of the way our friendships shape and ruin us. I loved the granular, emotive detail spent on the textures of CraftQ (a fictional analogue for ZZT, which I knew nothing about before reading this but then was interested enough in to read Anna Anthropy's excellent ZZT (Boos Fight Books) directly after), IRC queries, the glow of a family PC in a rec room late at night in the 1990s. I loved the surfeit of beautiful dream-images and period (both 1998 and 2016) detail. I loved how many ideas were in it about friendship and gender and art. If I were being extremely lazy I'd be tempted to comp it to I Saw The TV Glow meets Tomorrow And Tomorrow And Tomorrow (a book I loathed and longed to see done properly...), but this also reminded me in parts of B R Yeager's Negative Space and John Darnielle's Wolf in White Van. I really enjoyed Thornton's debut, Summer Fun, and am delighted by her commitment to very convincing fictional cultural objects, but I loved this book more. Will be recommending to lots of people - thanks for letting me read it!

Thanks to Dead Ink books and NetGalley for an eARC of A/S/L by Jeanne Thornton but sadly, I do not feel I am in the intended audience for this book and so I DNF'd at 40%.

This book, that spans the lives of 3 separate people between their teen years developing a video game together, to their adult lives where they all live in New York City, is so very character-driven, it sometimes doesn't feel like there is much of a plot. And this isn't a bad thing! I know many people who love an emotional narration that relies in how the characters are processing their lives but I struggle with it most times.

The beginning of this book was really interesting and I know many people, from my own teenage years in the 90's, that would LOVE the intense focus on the coding of Saga of the Sorceress and how Sasha, Lillith and Abraxas set-up their gaming company. I felt intense nostalgia during the chapter that was told entirely through a chatroom conversation among online friends. I chatted to my own friends that way!

But the rest of the story that focuses on their adult lives left my wanting. There is a very specific audience for this book, and I think when the right person finds this, they will truly feel seen and represented.

The concept is fantastic, and so are the title, the cover, and the queer rep, but unfortunately I found the writing too dense to connect with the story or the characters, so I had to DNF a quarter of the way through.