Today is the Transgender Day of Visibility, so I want to give greater visibility to a terrific middle grade series with a trans protagonist that you may have missed because his trans identity isn’t the point. He’s just a young man who has adventures through the multiverse via magical suitcases, and happens to be trans. It’s delightful!
In the first volume of The Strangeworlds Travel Agency by L. D. Lapinski (Aladdin), 12-year-old Flick Hudson isn’t excited about her family’s move from the city to a small English village. Her parents are busy with long hours at their working-class jobs and caring for her younger brother, so Flick wanders alone—and stumbles into the Strangeworlds Travel Agency, which houses a collection of suitcases, each of which is a portal to another world.
The overseer of the Strangeworlds Society is eccentric, sarcastic 18-year-old Jonathan Mercator, whose mother is dead and whose father has mysteriously disappeared into the multiverse. Jonathan, who has a penchant for old tweed suits, discovers Flick’s own latent magical abilities and enlists her to help find his father. Flick soon discovers that all is not well in said multiverse. Buildings and streets in its central city, Five Lights, are disappearing. And if Flick and Jonathan can’t fix the problem, traveling through other worlds to do so, Five Lights might collapse into nothingness—taking Flick’s world with it.
While Jonathan’s trans identity is incidental to the plot, it does show at times, e.g., in a reference to someone who “thought I was a girl” and in his being exceptionally modest about where he changes his clothes. (Lapinski has confirmed that he is trans, in case there was any doubt.) Additionally, a side character uses they/them pronouns.
In the second volume, The Edge of the Ocean, Flick and Jonathan receive an urgent letter from Pirate Queen Nyfe. Ships in Nyfe’s oceanic world of the Break are mysteriously disappearing at an alarming rate, and their flat world itself seems to be shrinking. The danger threatens both the pirates and the mermaids of the world, although both also seem bent on fighting each other. Can Flick and Jonathan (and Jonathan’s visiting cousin Avery) find a way to save all the inhabitants?
Pirates and mermaids abound in this seafaring adventure mystery. While there’s action aplenty, Flick also shows personal growth in this volume as she gains more control over her own magical powers. She and Avery are also, it seems, developing crushes on each other. We see hints, too, that Jonathan is attracted to other men, and we learn a little more about the disappearance of his father. His trans identity is again not stressed, although there is a passing reference to him wearing a binder (when it becomes visible after he falls into the ocean)—but it is simply noted without any of the characters remarking on it.
It’s wonderful seeing queer characters have adventures when their queer identities are incidental to the tale (which is not to say their queer identities should be totally ignored; the small references to Jonathan’s transness above show how it can still be acknowledged). Trans characters have been particularly lacking in this type of story (though there have been some), so it’s great to see another.
On first glance, Flick may seem like the main protagonist, but as the books progress, Jonathan comes into his own; I really see them as a pair. Lapinski has talked about them being a duo and about their “flat team structure.” They have also described Jonathan by observing, “There’s bits of Artemis Fowl in his character, some William de Worde from Discworld, Q from the latest James Bond movies, and there’s definitely some Good Omens’ Aziraphale and Crowley mixed into his personality, too!” If you know any of those books or movies, you’ll have a sense of just how fun Jonathan is.
The Strangeworlds series is fantastical in the best tradition of classic British children’s literature (with whiffs, too, perhaps, of Peter Pan and Narnia), but happily queerer. A third volume is planned for this fall; while I have not yet read it and can say nothing about its content (stay tuned), you can preorder it if you like.
(And yes, this is one of the several magical queer books I mentioned last week as deserving of a movie series.)
For more middle grade and picture books with trans characters, see my database—start typing “Trans” into the Tag box and choose from the options that appear.
