Take a photo of a barcode or cover
121 reviews by:
courierjude
Eh. I'm not the target audience, and I may just be too old for YA romances.
This was an odd one, overall competent, but strangely hollow feeling. The main character is kicked out by their family after coming out as trans, and yet the entire book feels sort of like reading the back of a sweet queer cereal box. There's nothing I can pick out specifically to pin this to -- it is reckoned with in sometimes direct, difficult conversations. The main character has flashbacks/panic attacks and seeks therapy. But there's this overall feeling, like the inciting incident for the story is just this unintegrated lattice on top of a mostly paint-by-numbers sanitized romance.
Love and light to my fellow white trans people, there's also a tendency we have to add non-white characters into our stories in these strange, cut-out-esque ways. They are there partly out of a real desire to represent non-white people in stories, especially queer stories, but it sometimes comes off as just adding colorful background or like an almost self-congratulatory move. I'm thinking of a few of the main characters' friends at their new school, as well as their best online friend.
It is not that brown queer hijabis don't exist, or that any other non-white characters in these books doesn't exist, it's just that their inclusion often feels unreckoned with and similarly hollow. It may just be a result of this author struggling with writing or implying compelling inner worlds in the majority of their characters, but it was especially stark for the characters of color. To be clear, I'm not arguing with the inclusion of black and brown characters in books by white writers or anyone else, I just wish that the racism in publishing wasn't preventing more own voices lit from existing so this trend isn't as exhausting and everpresent in YA queer literature.
Queer lit often only gets published when it is sanitized in a few ways, one being that publishers often see white authors as closer to palatability. It's unfortunate and frustrating.
Rant over. Tl;dr Not for me, cute in a strange way, but I prob think too much about what I read. If you just read to kick back and enjoy YA romance, maybe this is for you
This was an odd one, overall competent, but strangely hollow feeling. The main character is kicked out by their family after coming out as trans, and yet the entire book feels sort of like reading the back of a sweet queer cereal box. There's nothing I can pick out specifically to pin this to -- it is reckoned with in sometimes direct, difficult conversations. The main character has flashbacks/panic attacks and seeks therapy. But there's this overall feeling, like the inciting incident for the story is just this unintegrated lattice on top of a mostly paint-by-numbers sanitized romance.
Love and light to my fellow white trans people, there's also a tendency we have to add non-white characters into our stories in these strange, cut-out-esque ways. They are there partly out of a real desire to represent non-white people in stories, especially queer stories, but it sometimes comes off as just adding colorful background or like an almost self-congratulatory move. I'm thinking of a few of the main characters' friends at their new school, as well as their best online friend.
It is not that brown queer hijabis don't exist, or that any other non-white characters in these books doesn't exist, it's just that their inclusion often feels unreckoned with and similarly hollow. It may just be a result of this author struggling with writing or implying compelling inner worlds in the majority of their characters, but it was especially stark for the characters of color. To be clear, I'm not arguing with the inclusion of black and brown characters in books by white writers or anyone else, I just wish that the racism in publishing wasn't preventing more own voices lit from existing so this trend isn't as exhausting and everpresent in YA queer literature.
Queer lit often only gets published when it is sanitized in a few ways, one being that publishers often see white authors as closer to palatability. It's unfortunate and frustrating.
Rant over. Tl;dr Not for me, cute in a strange way, but I prob think too much about what I read. If you just read to kick back and enjoy YA romance, maybe this is for you
