Kacen Callender is a trans­masc­uline Stonewall and Lambda Award-winning author who has written for children, teens and adults; Felix Ever After is a YA m/m romance novel with a Black, queer, transmasculine protagonist.

Felix is a 17-year-old art student in New York who worries that he’s never been loved or in love. After a transphobic troll deadnames him and violates his identity at the start of summer school, he wants to get revenge to help heal that hurt.

But, inevitably for someone moving into adulthood and wondering about his place in the universe, that’s only one of several complicated emotions he’s working through.

One thing I liked about Elise Hu’s review for NPR is that she addresses the thing that might be discomfiting for some readers who are white, cis, straight, middle-class and, frankly, not 17 anymore:

All of those boxes Felix checks, in addition to being abandoned by his mother early on, can make the character hard to believe if you’re in parts of the country where white is still the dominant racial group and boy and girl binaries are the only socially acceptable options.

But today’s teens are part of the most mixed, gender-bending generation ever, and they should get the spotlight in more stories. And ultimately, Felix’s empower­ment by the book’s cinematic end wouldn’t feel so hard-won and well-earned without all of his complicated identity issues.

I spent a good chunk of this book being irritated at teenagers and their messy drama  — it’s not a major revelation that, at the age of 45, I can no longer relate to 17yos. But Callender has created such richly-written characters, such a well-paced story and explains concepts such as gender, privilege and intersectionality so clearly that it’s really hard not to be drawn in and root for these characters — even when they are naïve, messy, irritating teenagers, indeed perhaps because of that. And so I spent the last few chapters with eyes full of happy tears.

Rachel Charlene Lewis interviewed Callender at length for Bitch Media and their conversation is a really interesting read, especially on the subjects of creating credible young-adult characters, about gender identity and how both they and Felix re-questioned their own, and about misgendering — including the review of Felix Ever After from