Amory Serna

I found this book to be cliche and kind of unrealistic. I know the point of it was to help cisgender readers understand a transgender life experience, but it was honestly pretty lazy representation. Telling such a black and white story about a trans girl will give readers a very limited perspective on what it means to be transgender. Everything about the main character's life was incredibly basic and blatantly catering to white, cishet readers from her overly-masculine father to her close-minded classmates to her race and sexuality. I'm pretty sure that the only reason this book ever became popular and won an award is because there was no competition. I wish there were more transgender themed literature out there, because this provides such limited representation. Something else that really bothered me about the book were Amanda's classmates. I mean come on, the story doesn't take place in the 1800s! All her classmates were so incredibly ignorant, which in our day and age of media consumption was just plain unrealistic. There should have at least been a few other kids who were educated on what transgender meant and stood up for Amanda. As you can probably tell, I have a deep dislike of this book. That being said, it provides good material for critical thinking and at least gives the world a story about an FTM trans girl, in which literature is sorely lacking.