If I Can Give You That
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
For fans of Kacen Callender and Mason Deaver comes a heart-tugging coming-of-age YA debut that takes a poignant look at gender identity, sexuality, friendship, and family—both the one we’re born into and the one we find for ourselves.
Seventeen-year-old Gael is used to keeping to himself. Though his best friend convinces him to attend a meeting of Plus, a support group for LGBTQIA+ teens, Gael doesn’t plan on sharing much. Where would he even start?
Between supporting his mother through her bouts of depression, dealing with his estranged father, and navigating senior year as a transgender boy at a conservative Tennessean high school, his life is a lot to unload on strangers.
But after meeting easygoing Declan, Gael is welcomed into a new circle of friends who make him want to open up. As Gael’s friendship with Declan develops into something more, he finds himself caught between his mother’s worsening mental health and his father’s attempts to reconnect.
After tragedy strikes, Gael must decide if he can risk letting the walls around his heart down and fully opening up to those who care for him.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Trans 17-year-old Gael, who is white, has had trouble making friends in his Glenwood, Tenn., town; he assumes it's because "people don't really know what to do with me." When his best and only real friend Nicole, a white, trans lesbian, persuades him to attend a meeting of the local LGBTQ youth support group, called Plus, he struggles to participate, feeling awkward, until he makes an unexpected connection with a Black, gay band geek, classmate Declan. As Gael opens up to Declan, he becomes more self-confident, even volunteering to fundraise for Plus. While his social life is blossoming, however, he struggles to care for his mother, who attempted suicide six years earlier and whose depression is worsening; navigate a fraught relationship with his emotionally distant father, newly back in town; and wrestle with a first crush that is complicated by dysphoria and questions surrounding his sexuality. Bulla (Letters to the Home) handles complex topics such as consent, gender and sexuality, and mental illness with nuance, and Gael's sensitive first-person narration believably renders his internality and gradual growth in this confidently written portrait of a young queer person finding his way. Ages 14–up.
