Ten-year-old Beatrice “Bug” Contreras is looking forward to spending the summer of 1987 as she is used to doing: with her brother, Danny, on Venice Beach in Los Angeles. Danny, however, is 14 and wants to be with friends his own age. Since their single White mother works, Bug must therefore stay with two neighbors, neither of whom likes the beach. Bug’s summer is saved from awfulness by the arrival of neighbor Phillip’s 11-year-old nephew Frankie. Frankie and Bug don’t seem to have a lot in common, but Frankie is as excited as Bug at the idea of catching the Midnight Marauder, the serial killer threatening the area.
As the story unfolds, we learn that Phillip is gay and Frankie is transgender (but has no word for this at first). Frankie has been sent by his parents to live with Phillip for the summer in order to get his feelings of being a boy “out of his system” (which Bug immediately identifies as the ridiculous notion that it is). The book is not “about” Frankie being trans, however, although author Gayle Forman shows how his identity impacts his responses to people and events. Rather, the book focuses on broader themes of friendship, family, justice, and allyship, across lines of gender identity, sexual orientation, and racial/ethnic identity. Danny, for example, inherited their father’s dark skin and is learning to take pride in their Salvadoran heritage, but is also the target of racism, while Bug gradually realizes how being a light-skinned biracial person has shielded her.
When Phillip is mugged, Frankie and Bug turn their investigative skills toward finding his attacker, which opens their eyes to the awful reality of gay-bashing. With Phillip incapacitated, Bug’s Aunt Teri arrives to help out, but she harbors prejudices of her own. As family secrets come out, Bug realizes that people are sometimes more complex than they first appear, that family can be defined in many ways, and that acts of friendship and allyship can have a lasting impact. Over the course of the book, Bug learns just how insidious prejudices can be and how close to home they can hit, but also how to stand against them.
Resources at the end include books and websites about refugees and about trans/nonbinary/gender-nonconforming kids. I have no complaints about the ones Forman chose to include; two unfortunate omissions, however, are PFLAG and Gender Spectrum. It also would have been helpful to note that while the term “transsexual” was used when Frankie finally learns a term for his identity, and that was historically accurate in 1987, this is now an older term not always used by trans people today.
A touching, sometimes funny, always insightful book with engaging characters that doesn’t let its lessons bog down the story.
