Sadly, this one fell far short of my expectations - it all goes downhill from the catchy title and the cute girl on the cover. The story itself was okay even if it didn't have an original bone in its body, but I just completely wasn't feeling Lemus' writing style. Oh well.

Eh. I wanted to like this more, but the writing style was too distracting for me to be able to even notice the lovely metaphors that my friends say are tucked in there. I just can't deal with five adjectives in front of everything, and all the made-up words. It just makes me feel so snarly irritated irritable angrymush.

I wrote a complete review here:http://satia.blogspot.com/2008/02/in-...I would definitely recommend this novel as a very good debut novel and I do look forward to reading more from the author.

I should not have finished this book in public. But, on second thought, I think it would please Felicia Luna Lemus that I spent the final third of her novel weeping openly in a chain fresh Mex restaurant. It seems bizarrely fitting.I would call this a classical love story, as my professor once outlined it: "Boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl again." But Trace Elements is more: girl meets girl, girl gets girl, what is a girl anyway, girl loses girl, girl's grandma dies,

i love this book. love love love love love. i've been looking forever for someone barbara kingsolver/julia alvarez-ish who writes about queer themes and this book is rockin it. it's so lyrically, poetically written and no one cuts themselves or fucks someone anonymously in a bathroom. gorgeous.

I want to like this more. I want to rant and rave at the way the way the strange somewhat stream of conscious writing really allows readers to be in Lettie's, the narrator, head. But, then I get to the end of the book and it feels as if Luna Lemus just got tired and didn't know that to do with Lettie anymore. Lettie had chewed all the cuticles she could and wondered about K long enough. The ending derailed the whole whole book. I still don't want it to, but it did. Lettie stays the same exact ch...

this book was alright... if there were 2 and 1/2 stars i would have given it that. i like it.. but her writing style is at times tiresome. It was nice to read queer lit and her characters were charming...but i wanted more-especially considering all the press she has received. Maybe I should have started with her second book.

"I've looked up at clouds before and wanted to take a bite out of them. Not out of some nauseating cute appreciation for their soft purity, but to consume their thick bitter dense smog into my body before it evaporates into something that will disappear from my sight. The latte Rob bought for me that day tasted like a cloud." -44

The writing style is cute at first, and by mid-point gets a bit bothersome. A cute story, but nothing special. My favourite parts had to do with gender...about being a woman who feels herself to be not quite feminine and not quite masculine, but somewhere wavering in between. With that I can relate.The use of the Weeping Woman myth is intriguing, but not adequately woven into the story. It mainly just causes confusion. By the end, I didn't feel much of anything for the main character, or for any...

This was one of the books on a reading list that I had for a university course for a gender in literature focus. The novel has almost a poetic style in writing, and it was easy to follow along. The ending wasn't all that great to me personally, but it didn't affect my reading experience in a negative way.I loved the minor inclusions of some folk stories that are connected to the life of Leti.

I read this before I was fully out to myself (fascinating how all these gay books just seemed to hop off the shelves and into my eager hands!), and was fascinated with the complex set of friend/love/sexual relationships the group of main characters have with one another. I'd like to reread it now; I suspect all of it would seem a lot more familiar at this point.

I had high hopes of this book, but it didn't really live up to them. I hate to say, honestly, I enjoyed the LA lesbians of The L Word more. Some interesting language, but it pushed too hard with its central use of the myth of Weeping Woman, and the writing was often overdone.

The stream of consciousness and magical realism of this story really spoke me to as a queer POC who juggles my culture and my queerness and the ways I fall between the cracks of both and more.

I used this book in a class I taught once about queer media studies, and one of my students said "At first, I didn't care, because it's about women, and then I realized that the author does amazing things with language." And there you have it.She wrote another book which is also good, but I liked this one better.

I am clearly not "post-hipster queer" or whatever the book jacket blurb said this book was about. But it was still fun. A little bit magical, a little bit post-modern, and, indeed, a little bit post-hipster queer. Not for everyone, for sure.

Overall, the book was good but could have been grating if it went on any longer. This applies to the distinctive and compelling narrative voice, the lives of the protagonist and her string of relationships that don't quite work, and the whole "post-hipster queer" lifestyle which I'm not quite sure what it means, but reads like an urban twenty-something navel gazing about not having made it yet.

this woman breaks language open. a perfect antidote to all five hundred versions of that one michelle tea book.

This book is about a dyke princess that lives in L.A. and her lovers and friends and ex lovers who become friends and her grandmother whose she left behind in a way so that she can explore her life away from the city she was raised in. She's haunted by a childhood character called Weeping Woman who follows her throughout her life.I started reading this book and put it down and came back to it when I was brave enough. It wasn't an easy read. The way Lemus uses language and the way she forms her s...

Instead of the classic 'Coming of Age' story, I'd put this in a 'Coming of Gender' category which I have now just invented.It was a nice read, but the writing style was a litter jerky for me. Around the middle things started to get slow so it was bit of a push to get through it and the ending was a little lacking in power.

This had a rough start—the language being overly styled and familiar, characters popping up without introductions, their pronouns being muddled before the reader learns that several are gender-nonconforming, etc. But eventually it smooths out and the book becomes much more readable. There are some interesting discussions on language, identity and LGBT+ politics here. Set in what I assume was the late 80s or maybe early 90s (cassette tapes were featured) Leti navigates her own identity as a dyke,...