Review: Birthday

Birthday by Meredith Russo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Trigger warnings for this book: homophobia (including repeated use of slurs), transphobia (including internalized transphobia and - often unintentional on the characters' parts - misgendering), gender dysphoria, alcohol abuse, parental death, attempted suicide by overdose.

Meredith Russo debuted strongly with If I Was Your Girl a couple of years ago, and with her new novel Birthday, she blows it out of the water. Once again a relatively short piece of YA contemporary, #ownvoices with a trans girl protagonist - though in this case, she shares the protagonist and narrator positions with her best friend, a cis boy...and over the six years this story takes place, the evolution of their dynamic in all sorts of unexpected and life-affirming ways.


And maybe some not-so-affirming ways.

After all, it's a small Tennessee town that wouldn't be out of place in a Jeff Zentner book (appropriately, Zentner himself blurbs this novel.) So it comes as no surprise that there's a great local emphasis on high school football and strict gender roles and "ain't no son of mine gonna be a (slur censored)" syndrome.

As backwards as some of Eric's friends and family have it, thankfully, Morgan's family is far more open-minded. And yet, she still has a great deal of difficulty summoning the courage to live openly even with those who love her. Part of this owes to her questioning her sexuality as well as her gender - she can't quite say that she likes girls or guys or any other gender, and while she never identifies as ace-spec, that's how I read her - demisexual, to be precise.

Six years go by with a snap of your fingers, and by the time this book ends, you'll be crying happy tears too. Especially because while there's one particularly triggering scene (parent walks in at the very worst time) close to the end, it's quickly followed by a justifiably angry and cathartic reaction, and then the true ending.

The happy ending.

It wouldn't be Russo if the road to that sweetness weren't rough, but my God she does the job and then some. That Eric and Morgan can depend on each other so strongly, even when they hit inevitable roadblocks, still makes this book bring tears to my eyes even twelve hours after I finished reading it - and hell, maybe twelve days later too.

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