Sacred Country
Publisher
Macmillan Publishing
Publication Year
1992
ISBN
9780671886097
Pages
336 pages
Genre
historical
Format
novel
Item Type
Fiction
Annotation
"I have a secret to tell you, dear, and this is it: I am not Mary. That is a mistake. I am not a girl. I'm a boy." Mary's fight to become Martin, her claustrophobic small town, and her troubled family make up the core of this remarkable and intimate, emotional yet unsentimental novel. As daring as Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Sacred Country inspires us to reconsider the essence of gender, and proposes new insights in the unraveling of that timeless malady known as the human condition. As Mary's mother, Estelle, observes, "There are no whole truths, just as there is no heart of the onion. There are only the dreams of the individual mind." Sweeping us through three decades, from the repressive English countryside of the fifties to the swinging London of the sixties to the rhinestone tackiness of seventies America, Rose Tremain unmasks the "sacred country" within us all.
Grade Level
9-12
Diversity Topics
LGBTQ (Gender and Sexuality); Transgender; transgender; girl to boy
Main Character
transgender boy
Race/Ethnicities
White
Family Formation
mother and father
LGBTQ+
girl to boy
Keywords
physical identity; Olympics; mental hospital; alcoholism; transformation
Diversity Impact
direct
STARS Citation
Tremain, Rose, "Sacred Country" (1992). Diverse Families. 994.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/diversefamilies/994