Review: Felix Ever After

Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Trigger warnings for this book: transphobia, allusions to homophobia, allusions to deadnaming, assorted bullying, catfishing.

There's a lot of YA contemporaries in recent years that I'll give a 3.5 and either round up or down. This one, I'll round up because of how much Felix Love, as a Black, queer, trans teen, needs the love. Yeah, I know, bad pun, bad Ricky...but I'm sure Felix would approve.

Okay, I'll be honest, though...this isn't my favorite book. Nearly everyone else I see has given it five stars and I just can't do that, and I hate to say it, but I think it might be because of how messy the characters are. I mean, it makes sense that the characters in this book are messy af - they're cut from a lot of the same cloth as, say, a few of Becky Albertalli's or Adam Silvera's or L.C. Rosen's books. Not unlike Callender's earlier YA title This is Kind of an Epic Love Story, it's also a pretty diverse friend group spanning all the spectra of race, gender, and sexuality, in which it seems like everyone's hooked up with everyone else at some point...except Felix. Poor Felix, who just wants a head-over-heels romance. Callender's previous novel was so sex-positive that it made me cry because I haven't ever been able to live that way, and similarly, Felix Ever After feels...well, not so much sex-positive as romance-positive. Except at the same time, building those romances is a house of cards because it involves a lot of hidden identity, and hell, at least one of them begins as Felix trying to figure out who the hell put up a bunch of pre-transition photos of himself and exposed his deadname. 

Maybe this is Callender's way of deconstructing a few of those other contemporary YA books - especially Simon Vs., in which we fall in love with those anonymous messages between Simon and Blue, but Felix, even though he's from a rich family (hell, everyone in this book is a super-rich NYC art student, probably the biggest reason why I had a harder time connecting to this one because I must be one of the few artsy-type queers who actually wants to avoid NYC like the plague) just doesn't have that kind of privilege.

At least my ship sails in the end, and Felix's bully gets outed and thrown down all the pegs. So happy endings all around, eh? Maybe that's also why this one gets the round-up to the four stars from me too.

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