Transgender themes enter teen fiction
USA Today covers the new wave of transgender books for young adult readers.
If I Was Your Girl, published by Flatiron Books, is not an outlier; 2016 is shaping up to be the year trans teen fiction achieves breakout visibility, with a number of titles already published or lined up for the fall.
“There’s something in the zeitgeist,” says author Kristin Elizabeth Clark, whose 2013 novel Freakboy, featuring a teen boy who “sometimes” wants to be a girl, was ahead of the curve. Clark’s new young-adult novel, Jess, Chunk and the Road Trip to Infinity, about a trans teen girl (Jess) with a major crush on her best friend Chuck (better known as Chunk), is due in November from Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
