Rough Patch

March 15, 2017
A closeted aspiring figure skater struggles with friends, family, and relationships.Keira's Calgary high school isn't a bastion of tolerance, but there's a small clique of gay kids she could theoretically join if she revealed her sexuality. Sadly, she knows they'd never accept a -by-sex-you-all.- If she dates a boy, she'll never get a chance with a girl; if she reveals her feelings for boys, the gay kids will think she's a coward trying to seem -normal.- Plagued by crushes on boys and girls alike, Keira struggles with her best friend's casual homophobia. After a secret relationship, revelations, and traumas, Keira encounters a resolution so cruel that it hearkens back to the era when queer teens in books for teens were always punished by novel's end. The myriad concerns of this white ice skater's life (as well as the aforementioned issues, Keira struggles with bullying at home and at school, money problems, and grade worries) threaten to overwhelm the narrative. Her supposedly all-consuming passion for figure skating is drowned by the surplus of topics and enthusiastic parenthetical asides and could be swapped with any other hobby with scarcely any noticeable change. Bisexual teen protagonists are rare enough to give some value to a middling entry like this one, but it's best for completists who've already read better choices, such as Hannah Moskowitz's landmark Not Otherwise Specified (2015). (Fiction. 12-15)

COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

April 1, 2017
Gr 8 Up-Keira has just started high school, and already her boy-obsessed best friend Sita is trying to get her a boyfriend. The problem is that Keira is not sure she wants a boyfriend; she spent the summer with a crush on a girl only to find herself in the arms of a boy, and she is now grappling with what it really means to be bisexual. She occupies her time at the ice rink training in competitive figure skating, at her after-school job cleaning dentist offices, and taking on the world alongside her precocious sister Sammie, who is a wheelchair user, while avoiding her antagonistic brother Tyler. After a blowup with Sita, Keira finds solace in new friend and romantic interest Jayne, a confident and strong-willed lesbian who is hiding her sexuality from her fundamentalist Christian family. Keira's parents are selectively supportive, encouraging her to excel at school but skirting the issue of the teen's sexuality. The writing is weak (a less compelling Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging by Louise Rennison), and the pacing is poor, with very little happening in the first half, and the highly dramatic ending feels rushed. While the prose and plotting leave much to be desired, this is one of few realistic YA novels about bisexuality. VERDICT Recommended for libraries looking to amp up the B of their LGBTQ collections.-Shira Pilarski, Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School, Washington, DC

Copyright 2017 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.