A mystery-horror adventure with a transgender demiboy protagonist and an underlying theme about embracing all parts of ourselves.
Twelve-year-old Ollie Di Costa loves being trans, even though his former best friend Jake turned into his worst bully when he found out. Now, Ollie knows better than to trust people. Even if his transness isn’t a problem, however, “there were plenty of other things about him that were reasonably unlikable,” he muses. He’s quick to anger and easily annoyed, even though he doesn’t want to become like his parents, who are always fighting. The only person he’s really close to is his sister Mia.
After Jake harasses him one day and adds Ollie’s crush Noah to his targets, Ollie fights back and is sent home. He talks things out with Mia at their special place on the beach—until he is suddenly dragged into the sand by mysterious black vines, and pops out into a creepy alternate world, where he befriends a two-tailed cat he names Wishbone and has to flee a shadowy, threatening man.
After making it back to the normal world with Wishbone, Ollie soon discovers that the cat has magical wish-granting powers. He sees a way to solve all of his problems: bullies, fighting parents, financial insecurity, and more. But each wish also creates a curse, taking from one person what it gives to another, and opening a way for the shadowy, twisted Mage of the other world to wreak havoc in theirs. Ollie tries to stop the Mage with help from Mia, Noah, and school friend Lauren, but he’s also tempted to use the wishes despite the consequences. Can he fight the Mage, learn to trust the others around him, and not let his anger consume him?
Justine Pucella Winans, who won a Stonewall Honor for The Otherwoods, has created a wonderfully flawed and relatable protagonist in Ollie. Winans doesn’t center the plot on his transness, although it comes up in ways that feel organic. We learn, for example, that Ollie has just started to identify as a demiboy, most of the time feeling like a boy but other times being “all genders and no gender.” Ollie is afraid, though, that “if he wasn’t overly boyish, people would go back to treating him like he wasn’t one,” He’s therefore careful to hide his love of baking, which he’s afraid will seem “girly.” And we see how he deflects people noticing him for his transness and queerness by making them notice him for other things, even while he worries that people will “accept a nice, perfect, queer kid, maybe. But not a jerk like me.”
The story is full of other queerness, too. Mia is bi (and has her own subplot with a crush); Lauren is a lesbian; and Noah likes boys. And there are some fun moments that simply radiate queer joy. (The cat tree. I’ll say no more.)
I also rather loved the scene in which Ollie asks his school librarian for demiboy stories, and rejects her suggestion of “nonfiction books that droned on about gender. Ugh. The last thing Ollie wanted was to feel like being queer gave him extra homework.” Instead, he wants to read about “demiboys on adventures, or out solving mysteries, or fighting monsters—something that he could relate to that wasn’t so boring.” I’ve long sought the same thing in LGBTQ-inclusive kids’ books. Winans gives us exactly such an adventure while also giving us a remarkably nuanced look at queer identities and at one young person’s growth. Highly recommended.
Ollie and his family are White; Noah is Asian (Korean American).
