Melissa and Rick

Melissa is a 10-year-old boy christened George who knows she’s really a girl. And the book describes how she manages to tell her best friend this, as well as her older brother and mother. It all hinges around a school play of Charlotte’s Web, in which Melissa wants to play Charlotte but gets turned down because, according to her teacher, a boy can’t possibly play a female spider.

The language is straightforward and simple. The play plot could turn up in any book for young people, with the message that they should ‘just be themselves’. But in this case, being themselves means being acknowledged as a transgender girl. And it’s all done so simply and delicately.

Something that Rick doesn’t quite pull off so well. Rick is a minor character in Melissa, one of a duo of jerks who delight in bullying her. But in this book, he comes to realize how much of a jerk his buddy Jeff is, and to become friends with Melissa, and with his somewhat distant grandfather, a man with a secret the book celebrates.

All this is done with the same simple warmth and delicacy on display in Melissa. It’s infectiously joyful. But there are chapters when the LGBTQ+ kids get together in private that throw out delicacy and suggestion and hit you over the head with all the blunt force trauma of a Maoist cadre meeting. They don’t sound like kids anymore; they sound like mouthpieces for slogans.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m too old for this. Maybe the young readers the book is aimed at will accept those slogans and take them to heart. And I’m all for that. Just as I’m all for the message of both books. I just wish that Rick had stuck to his gradual understanding of who he is, and his acceptance of others, and left it at that.