CWs: sibling death; ableism and internal ableism; misgendering, deadnaming, and transphobia; homophobia; bullying; racism; references to sexual harassment/assault; references to abusive parents and divorce; underage drinking; infidelity; graphic physical assault I do think the idea was good but the execution really fell flat for me since the characters were so terrible. We definitely need more books like this in terms of the representation but this really disappointed me. A trans boy enters a throw-down battle for the title of Homecoming King with the boy he dumped last summer in ZR Ellor's contemporary YA debut. On top of that, this book has a great, diverse cast of secondary characters, some absolutely mischievous shenanigans and authentic and relatable autism representation. naomi and lukas dating. like what was the point of that? it would be a lot better if they were just running together as friends who are mad at jeremy than trying whatever the mess that was. i'm not even mentioning how lukas threw himself into that relationship to distract himself by having a person to focus on. no. just no.

But Caldwell seems to burst open the notion of Irishness completely, interrogating, first, her own “complicated relationship” with the place she’s from, then setting out her wish to portray the “fresh narratives, perspectives and multiplicities that are coming from immigration to a place so long and persistently defined by emigration.” What cis people don’t get is that it’s not the wrong clothes, the wrong name, the wrong pronoun. It’s the strangling feeling, like you’ve been buried alive and are struggling to breathe, like you don’t exist. That the most important part of you is invisible and, thus, unreal. If people don’t see me as a boy, then they don’t see me at all. I’m sure no one will notice,” she says. Like it’s no big deal, a faux pas as small as showing up to a party in the same dress as the host. There I go, talking in the past tense. So let’s pretend for a second that we’ll see new episodes of FNL one day and look at what’s going on in this one:

May the best man/woman win.

I think this is a really important addition to the YA contemporary canon, especially as a piece of trans fiction, but I can already tell that it's going to be polarizing and get a bad rap for having "unlikeable" characters. It's definitely one of those narrative car crashes you can't look away from, and I think I kind of loved it. With that said, I'm still processing what that means.

Red creeps into her hairline. She knows she messed up. “Oh. Well. I don’t know, Jeremy. It’s just clothing. It doesn’t come with a gender attached.”

The story really looks at how Jeremy has had to distance himself from all things "feminine"—not just clothing and make-up, but even "feminine" behaviors and attitudes such as softness, empathy, generosity, and openness—just to be awarded the badge of "manhood" on cis men's terms. And it's not that he necessarily wants to disconnect himself from those things, but he feels like he's not allowed to have them or express them, because that opens the door to people invalidating his identity. And no, that shouldn't be the case, but that's the way it is. So he adopts a lot of aggression and even violence because he thinks if he can't get people to see him as a man, maybe he can get them to fear him as a man, because he thinks fear is a shortcut to respect.