bookriot:
A couple of interesting findings while doing...
A couple of interesting findings while doing research: there are so
very few books for the 3-6th grade reading levels featuring LGBT main
characters. Even among the lists compiled of best LGBT books, picture
books and YA books dominate, with one or two middle grade titles, if
any, per year. But even more interesting than that was discovering that
books being labeled LGBT for middle grade tend to show a parental
relationship that’s on the spectrum… and it’s not usually the main
character’s parents but parents of one of his/her friends. If the LGBT
individual is someone related to the main character, uncles seem to be a
popular choice.
Despite being published in the last few years, some of these books
are either out of print or challenging to track down in print format.
While they’re accessible via ebook, I can’t help wondering how that
hinders kids in this age group from discovering them organically.
http://bookriot.com/2016/06/13/lgbtqia-books-middle-grade-readers/
I can’t get two of the three books on this list either, sadly, but George was singularly amazing and still seems to be able to get gotten from bookshops and local libraries in Australia at least and even in audiobook for those who read better that way.
George is the story of a young girl written from the viewpoint of a girl who is about 10 years of age. She’s also a character who was assigned male at birth. And as hard as it is for someone to come out, especially when they are so young and their family is so much a part of their lives, this book demonstrates perfectly just how much more hard it is for a trans person to pretend to be a gender that they aren’t.
A whole lot of this story is told through the filter of a class reading and then school play of Charlotte’s Web. George wants to be Charlotte, but of course she can’t because she is a boy. Her best friend Kelly is beautiful about this. Actually, her best friend Kelly is beautiful on all accounts, but I don’t want to spoil so I want go into specifics.
What unfolds through George’s exploration of ‘wanting to be Charlotte’, and just general life around her, is the courage to come out to her teachers and her family and her best friend Kelly about the fact that she really is a girl.
At all times of this novel, I really just wanted to hug all the characters, but especially George. I love the little visual details that recur such as how she combs her red hair forward as if she has bangs, before parting it in the middle the way she’s meant to do it. Even more than that, I love the part where George is, from the start to the end, gendered as she/her. The book is written from her point of view, so maybe that’s obvious. But even the other characters as they find out about her gender almost immediately start using the correct pronouns. It’s perfect.
Because it’s a middle school aged novel, this book is much shorter than I wanted. I could have very easily gone for twice as long again reading about George, at 10, or at 12, or at 15. Whatever. I am so, so glad that a book like this exists, and is up for so many awards.
