#lambdaawardnominee

“Straight people have it so much easier. They don’t understand. They can’t. There’s no such thing as openly straight.”

Rafe is a high school junior from Boulder, Colorado who has been out and proud since eighth grade. Unlike so many other gay youth, he’s never been bullied nor has he been made fun of because of his sexuality. Rafe knows how fortunate he is to live in a welcoming community and to have such an incredibly supportive family, but he’s starting to feel like the fact that he’s gay is the only thing that people really notice about him. This leaves him wishing that he could start over...

...so he decides to move across the country and attend an all-boys boarding school in Massachusetts and, most importantly, keep his sexuality a secret. Given his love of writing, Rafe is encouraged to keep a journal about his experience by one of his teachers who knows his secret. Given his love of soccer, Rafe immediately finds himself in an athletic clique and loves how his classmates think of him as jock.

Everything starts to get a bit complicated with Rafe’s experiment when he falls for one of his teammates. His teammate, Ben, is rather dreamy in how smart, articulate, and sensitive he is, but he’s straight. Or is he? The unique friendship that develops between them transcends labels, but is it all meaningless if Rafe can’t tell Ben the truth?

This book is refreshing in its approach and in how it encourages you to think about your own identity. Anyone that has ever struggled with labels, be they related to their sexuality or not, will identify with this incredible novel.

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“Tired of being known as "the gay kid", Rafe Goldberg decides to assume a new persona when he comes east and enters an elite Massachusetts prep school—but trying to deny his identity has both complications and unexpected consequences.”

Kristin Lattimer is the captain of her high school track team where she’s a hurdler and a damn good one at that. With a full college scholarship in her pocket, a homecoming queen crown on her head, and a boyfriend whom she loves deeply by her side, she feels like her life is really coming together.

When Kristin and her boyfriend make the decision to have sex for the first time, the perfect moment she was expecting turns out to be anything but. The romance was there but the experience was physically painful. After a trip to an OB-GYN, Kristin discovers that she is intersex which means that while she outwardly looks like a girl, she has male chromosomes and boy “parts.” If her making sense of this new reality wasn’t enough, Kristin’s diagnosis is leaked to the whole school. The life she once thought was coming together is now quickly coming apart.

Written sensitively and honestly, this realistic fiction novel tells the story of a teen struggling to determine whether they identify as Male, Female, or None of the Above.

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“Kristen discovers that she is intersex and possesses male chromosomes, a diagnosis that is leaked to the whole school, throwing Kristin's entire identity into question.”