I wanted to love this and I'm still glad it exists, but sometimes I get frustrated with publishers for not considering teen audiences and their needs? This is marketed as a YA novel, but it's an odd size, more like a picture book than a graphic novel, which is nice for the art but always such a hard sell to convince teens to read. And then, yes, I'm all for having more historical fiction that represents the reality that there have always been LGBTQ people, but I wonder if graphic novel was the best medium for this, esp for a teen audience? It seems to me that it could have used a bit more context? Specifically for Grace, the young trans woman, who is revealed to be trans by growing a beard and making vague references to not wearing dresses when she was younger, and I appreciate that it's not a tragic, deadnaming backstory etc but I also sincerely feel that some young readers could read this whole book and never really understand Grace to be a trans woman? (There are informative endnotes but maybe a preface would have been better? Or a...narrator or something?)

anyWHO though it's a fun adventure story and I think for readers who are themselves coming into the story with a moderate amount of knowledge about transness (and especially for readers who are themselves trans) this will be a good book.