4.5/5

I was really surprised by this one. I thought I'd like it but I've had such a hit and miss with middle grade lately that I wondered if this would be another flop but it turned out to be great!

This book deals heavily with grief and that really hit home for me. It was written in such a beautiful way that felt very natural and I ached for Bug! I really loved the relationship they had with their uncle and it all just felt really wholesome and loving.

It was really interesting to see a friendship that was so strained and you could hardly understand why they were friends at all. It was a complicated situation and I wanted to be annoyed at the way Bug was treated but the situation was very complicated and I couldn't fault either character.

The take on the supernatural elements was a lot more subdued than I expected but I really like the way it came through.

Bug's journey towards understanding their gender was a little underwhelming for me and I think it's a purely me thing. Often times when I read stories about trans or non-binary characters I look to relate to them as having lived my journey and a lot of the time that's the case. With Bug I didn't have a similar journey and for a second that made me thing their journey was written by a cis-person. Everyone is entitled to their own journey towards their identity and once I realised the author was trans I was able to really understand that Bug's journey is different from my own and that's completely acceptable. I think the most shocking thing was how quickly Bug accepted their gender and how quick all the changes were. I guess I would have liked a little more questioning or a slower discovery but that's on me.

This is a highly enjoyable middle grade book about a trans kid discovering themself through the help of their uncle's ghost. It's really special and I adored it.

I got a free ARC of this book via NetGalley.

I don't know how to begin here, except to say that as I write I'm still happy-ugly-crying from reading the majority of this book all in one go over the course of one evening. I do think that grown-up trans people might have this response a lot more than the kids who this book is intended for. Fair warning for all grown-up trans people.


Uncle Roderick just died, and Bug is about to start middle school. Bug, always a bookish, slightly weird, slightly lonesome child, loved Uncle Roderick, a gay man and drag queen who acted as an additional parent; now, in the wake of his passing, Bug is faced with the absence not only of Roderick, but of a childhood hiding in the ambiguity of vague tomboyishness. Bug's best friend Moira (formerly known by the tomboyish moniker Mo) feels she and Bug need to be made-over before the start of middle school in fall, and brings makeup and nail polish around constantly to try to fix the issues she sees with both of their vibes. Bug hates this, and also has no other friends. There is something had has never really clicked between Bug and other people. Bug narrates the details of life in the third person: "she went wading in the creek, catching minnows," "she climbed a tree," and imagines constantly that the events of Dickensenian fantasy books are what's happening instead of real life. Sometimes Bug looks in the mirror and Bug's face isn't Bug's face. But that's just how mirrors are, right?

Then there's the ghosts.

Bug's house is old (it's in Vermont) and it's always had ghosts. Bug feels them in cold spots, in vague hands snatching, and in dreams that once terrified baby Bug, sending baby Bug spinning down the hall into Uncle Roderick's arms. But now there's something else happening. Strange violent pranks seem to be targeting Bug, destroying small things around the house and hurting Moira. Bug knows Uncle Roderick wouldn't want to hurt anyone, but his presence also seems to definitely linger-- strange things point to his spirit still being present, sending Bug down a rabbit hole of combing through Roderick's things and researching ghosts desperately at the library. Bug realizes that if Roderick is still around, he must be trying to tell Bug something. But what?

And why did Roderick have all those materials about accepting trans youth in his closet?

A note appears, in Roderick's hand, in chicken scratch, but the words aren't words. Bug can't read it.

There are more trans kid books now than there used to be, and I appreciate the slow fattening of the meat on the bone, so to speak, but this is the first book I've found that captures and appreciates the haunting hollowness of adolescent dysphoria. I loved ghost books as a kid, and I think the unearthly feeling I had in my own body was part of why. Lukoff's real/unreal magic that is viscerally true to Bug but invisible to others works perfectly and is both chilling and undeniable. There is a beautiful scene where Bug stands in a creek and hears a strange chorus of ghost voices who shout out to him, filling his head with noise, but indecipherable--the chorus thins out until Bug hears a voice that is unmistakably Roderick, shouting, then talking, then whispering comfortingly-- but whose words are not comprehensible. Lukoff pairs the pain of living with a sensation of alienation and distraction one can't identify with one of the other major negative emotions I experience as a queer person: grief for the people who came before you who cannot speak to you in the ways you need, because they're gone. The loss of our queer parents, our caregivers, generations of people we might have been or loved or been loved by, is overwhelming, but it's something that kids feel too. In Lukoff's vision, our loved ones also love us, and they sometimes scream to us when we need to hear truth about the world we live in now. And we can love them, and they know.

Bug ends up okay in this; Bug experiences no bullying or cruelty, though there is grief and alienation and misunderstanding and financial precarity. This is as upbeat a book as any you will find, but it's also engaged deeply with the realities of living, and it is an honest and absolutely necessary thing to provide our children with.

(And for me and other grown-ups, our baby selves, hidden in us).