Twelve-year-old Mallory Marsh always wants to please everyone. That’s why she’s always ready to lend a pencil to a friend or sit for her twin brothers so her recently divorced mom can work. But this also has a downside—not being able to explain to her mom why she doesn’t want to be on the swim team this year, or that she’s struggling with math. If she doesn’t project the image of a “Perfect Daughter,” however, she’s afraid her hard-working mom, who relies on her help, might fall apart.
The only place where Mal can really express herself is in her science-fiction webcomic, Metal-Plated Heart. She’s lied about her age to join the online forum where she posts it, however, which means she publishes under a pseudonym and can’t tell anyone about it. She’s still figuring out who she really is, though, from what kind of pizza she likes to whether she’s queer, straight, or some other label. Her answers seem to shift depending on the friend she’s with. The idea of being queer doesn’t bother her (one friend is queer), but she just isn’t sure if any of the labels feel right.
We see her straining with the effort to always accommodate others. She eventually rebels by attending a comic club at the library instead of going to swim practice. There, she meets nonbinary Noa (who has two moms), who is helping to organize a drag story time. Mal develops a crush on Noa, but we also see her once again trying to mold her interests to fit the person she’s with.
Her comic is increasing in popularity, though, causing Mal to worry that her lies will be discovered and that her friends won’t like that she’s modeled many of her characters on them. Can she figure out who she really is and learn to express that? Or will her carefully built personas come crashing down around her?
Author Elisa Stone Leahy has crafted a nuanced and relatable protagonist, whose uncertainty about herself goes beyond just the matter of being queer or not. Mal is in that period of life when many young people feel uncertain about many aspects of themselves, and may feel a similar pressure to mold themselves to fit others’ perceptions. Many readers should find a resonance here.
Mal’s mom is Korean and her dad White, and we see aspects of Mal’s Korean heritage woven throughout the story. Noa has brown skin; other characters are Latina, Black, and White, and one is Muslim, and we see glimpses of how these identities manifest themselves in the characters’ lives. Several characters, both kids and adults, are queer, and the need to protect the drag story time from protestors forms an important subplot. (I’ll also note that while Mal does not choose a specific queer label, there’s a hint that she could be bi or pan; I’m therefore tagging this review that way so interested readers can find it.)
There’s a lot here that could have been pedantic, but Leahy keeps a light touch, blending Mal’s internal thoughts, dialogue, and text-message threads to create a lively narrative. While this is a prose book, not a graphic novel, “pages” from Mal’s webcomic start each chapter, adding interest and helping readers to see how Mal is incorporating aspects of her real life into her story.
Highly recommended.
