It is often said that if you follow someone, watch their streams and comment on their posts, you’re a fan, no matter how much you profess to hate them. This idea runs like a thread through Hot Girls with Balls, Benedict Nguyễn’s glossy satire that follows two internet-famous Asian-­American trans women who play for rival men’s volleyball teams as they try to balance their very public relationship with their physically and emotionally demanding careers. 

This is a novel about the tension between what we see on the surface and what is hidden beneath. Star players Six and Green are less in charge of their bodies than their coaches, managers and agents are. When their Covid bubble is punctured by news of a series of murders – the victims are all Asian trans women who are both like them and not – the two women want to do what they can to help. But when Green notes that ‘her 753k followers (as of this morning) would buy anything to support her’, Nguyễn shows how raising awareness might morph into an obsession with checking and rechecking your follower count.

Writing in breezy prose and dividing the novel into sections named after volleyball shots, Nguyễn keeps readers on their toes by playing with the perspective, occasionally moving it away from Six and Green. The novel is particularly smart in its treatment of Green’s teammate Walt, who is trans but closeted,