Through intense, diarylike chapters chronicling Charlie's journey, the author captures the brutal and heartbreaking way "girls who write their pain on their bodies" scar and mar themselves, either succumbing or surviving. Feeling rejected, Charlie, an artist, is drawn into a destructive new relationship with her sexy older co-worker, a "semifamous" local musician who's obviously a junkie alcoholic. But things don't go as planned in the Arizona desert, because sweet Mikey just wants to be friends. After spending time in treatment with other young women like her-who cut, burn, poke, and otherwise hurt themselves-Charlie is released and takes a bus from the Twin Cities to Tucson to be closer to Mikey, a boy she "like-likes" but who had pined for Ellis instead. Seventeen-year-old Charlie Davis, a white girl living on the margins, thinks she has little reason to live: her father drowned himself her bereft and abusive mother kicked her out her best friend, Ellis, is nearly brain dead after cutting too deeply and she's gone through unspeakable experiences living on the street.
14 & up)Īfter surviving a suicide attempt, a fragile teen isn't sure she can endure without cutting herself.
It was just good and bad and interesting and fucked-up and very human, like anything else.” (Fiction. Readers will likely come away agreeing with J: “Being trans wasn't special, and yet it was.
Responses to J's transition vary from affirming (his trans poet classmate Chanelle's support) to heartbreaking (his parents' resistance) to maddening (Melissa's attempt to make art with J as her “muse”). In his new haunts, including a seedy hotel, a downtown Starbucks, a trans support group and a high school for LGBT students, J encounters a vibrant and diverse cast of characters. A Google search leads him to the idea of taking testosterone, and J leaves home, certain that his parents will not accept his choices. He tries not to think about gender and covers his body in thick layers of clothing, but he still tenses up when his mother calls him “m'ija” or classmates call him “dyke.” After a heated argument with his best friend, Melissa, and a nearly physical fight at school, J starts cutting class. Finally, a book about a transgender teen that gives its central character a life in which gender and transition matter but do not define his existence! J lives with his Puerto Rican mother and Jewish father in Manhattan's working-class Washington Heights neighborhood but plans to go to college to study photography.
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