Published May 2023 via Feiwel & Friends
★★★★
Super sweet middle grade read about ice skating, gender identity, navigating friendships and middle school cruelty, and grief. I picked this up for the skating aspect but stayed for the grief processing, which feels on point—shifting understandings of identities when someone important is not there to learn about it is something I've thought a lot about in the past year (though in a different context than Mars has), and it's handled in a nicely understated manner here.
Some of the gender identity stuff feels a bit more heavy handed (there are lessons here), but I think that may be reflective of the fact that not only am I not the target audience (I'm almost three times Mars's age), but Mars's generation is learning about gender identity at a much younger age than my generation did, and the lessons are correspondingly age-appropriate and sometimes simplified. (I'm not sure when I first met someone who wasn't cis—or rather, was openly not cis—but I'm guessing college, and that wasn't because I was particularly sheltered but rather because at the time we hadn't really gotten past discussing the LGB part of things. Cue a whole bunch of learning on the fly!)
It's fascinating and cool how much things have changed in a few years—fifteen years ago I was struggling to find lesbian books, let alone lesbian books that didn't involve homophobic violence, in the LGBTQ selection; ten years ago I could find trans books in the YA section at the library; now I can find books that further subvert the gender binary in the middle grade crop of books. It'll be interesting to see what comes next.
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