God I struggled so hard with this book. I kept having to remind myself while reading it that a book cannot be perfect, that it won't speak to everyone, that expecting a book (especially about trans people, when you are a trans person) to do that is falling into that trope where we get so little representation that we put so much pressure on the people who do produce that representation and are never pleased.

All of that being said, even though I knew why this book had been so hyped the the 'lgbt ya lit' world (if there really is such a thing,) I googled somewhere in the first third to confirm that the author was indeed trans because fuck me this book felt like it was written by a cis person. In my edition, at the end, Russo writes a note first to her cis readers and basically says "I literally made this character a big stereotype with all these things to show you she is a girl and to make you understand that trans girls are girls the easiest transition possible for you to make" and then everything clicked into place. I highlighted that part and said in my notes "this makes everything make sense- but what about the trans readers? What are we supposed to do with this?"

And that's being a little unfair--there were parts of this book that I was like "oh thank fuck for articulating this," but most of it was like..... fit into so many tropes. I read somewhere that Russo was like "I wrote this so that we'd have a story where trans girls get a happy ending" and like yeah eventually but also like the outing sequence was so terrifying and awful because I'd read that, because I spent the whole book going "it'll be okay, she's not going to pull this bullshit on you" and then she did? And some of that might be the genre Russo is working in--like if you know anything about high schooler romcoms, you'll see the arc of this book pretty much perfectly, but also the stakes are so much higher here because she's writing about a trans girl and. I'm not sure how I feel about that part of it yet. Very little of it felt like an experience I related to (which, fair, I'm not a straight trans girl living in Georgia, just because we're both trans doesn't mean we have similarities in how we experience our trans-ness) and it really felt like I was reading a typical high schooler romcom with someone who just happened to be a trans girl. Which is probably Russo's point! But that switch is so not simple and so complicated and I'm still not sure how I feel about it.

(I did have to keep reading it because it also kind of felt like a thriller, with her whole 'going stealth' thing, which..... is also super fucking complicated and stereotype-y while still being part of people's lived experiences and it's just this book is so complicated and messy and I don't know how to feel about it.)