Felix Ever After

by Kacen Callender

Genres: Romance, Young Adult
Pages: 360
Rating:

Synopsis:

From Stonewall and Lambda Award–winning author Kacen Callender comes a revelatory YA novel about a transgender teen grappling with identity and self-discovery while falling in love for the first time.

Felix Love has never been in love—and, yes, he’s painfully aware of the irony. He desperately wants to know what it’s like and why it seems so easy for everyone but him to find someone. What’s worse is that, even though he is proud of his identity, Felix also secretly fears that he’s one marginalization too many—Black, queer, and transgender—to ever get his own happily-ever-after.

When an anonymous student begins sending him transphobic messages—after publicly posting Felix’s deadname alongside images of him before he transitioned—Felix comes up with a plan for revenge. What he didn’t count on: his catfish scenario landing him in a quasi–love triangle....

But as he navigates his complicated feelings, Felix begins a journey of questioning and self-discovery that helps redefine his most important relationship: how he feels about himself.

Felix Ever After is an honest and layered story about identity, falling in love, and recognizing the love you deserve.

It’s difficult to figure out how to rate Kacen Callender’s Felix Ever After, because I’m pretty sure it’d have meant an enormous amount to me when I was 10-15 years younger, but the teenageness of it all just hits wrong at this particular point in my life. I somewhat steer away from YA at the moment because of that, because it’s not for me, and it’s not super fair to complain when a book for a totally different target audience doesn’t chime with me! But I had a copy, and I wanted to give it a shot.

There were ways in which I really didn’t have fun with this book: the teenager thing, the drama of it all, but also the fact that it rhymed somewhat with experiences I had in school (a forced outing based on private stuff — the fact that everybody decided I was a lesbian was somewhat off-base and it’s not a way I’d define myself now, but that didn’t change anything about how bad it all was at the time). I’m over it, but it’s still not a fun time to think about or be reminded of so strongly.

But the strong friendships and bonds between the characters, the careful fumbling toward what feels right, that did all still come through and feel relevant. None of us are immune to getting tangled up in this stuff, no matter how old we are, and there was joy in seeing Felix come through, in seeing the strength of his bonds with Ezra, his father, and seeing him get free of stuff that wasn’t serving him.

In the end, I can’t say I loved it for me, but I love that it exists, and that other people can have it.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)