This was cute, and I am all about middle grade books with diversity representation. I love that there is an exploration of identities and the various reactions to coming out as gay. 

I didn’t really relate much to the characters, and perhaps that’s because I’m not the target audience, but I’d also argue that it’s because of how it’s written. It didn’t feel, to me, how 13 year old boys generally think or speak. I am not a 13 year old boy, so I am aware I’m not the best judge. But the cadence and sentence structure of some of the dialogue didn’t match the speech of a 13 year old boy for me. 

Eventually, I was able to just accept the fact that that was the case for this book and these characters and could continue on with the story. Wow, this story had some heavy-hitters right from the start. I love how it doesn’t shy away from complicated home-lives and things “normal” kids don’t deal with. And how it’s handled was well done in that it gave our main characters a really nice character arc of being kinder to themselves and with a new understanding of the people around them.