Yahoo has announced that it's closing down Geocities, its free website-hosting service, so the archive for the old 52 books blog will be going offline in the autumn. I have therefore decided to move some of the old reviews and other material over here, to make them easier to find. I am also going to see about taking the old blog down, since many of the links are broken and it has turned into a big mess. I am going to be posting this material under the label "blast from the past" and will try to post no more than one review, book list or essay a week.
This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove...
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