Megan Milks

2021. I really wanted to like this book more, but it was so scattered and uneven. I feel like it still needs a lot of editing to be what it should be, not in terms of sentences, but in terms of structure. It had all these disparate parts that didn’t really seem to fit together well. First was a girls mystery solving club which was sort of based on the Babysitter’s Club books. I feel like this part should maybe have been a separate book all of its own. It was sort a prequel to the real book which was about eating disorders and figuring out that you’re transgender. The transgender part didn’t really show up until the end, in a retrospective letter to a dead friend that the main character had maybe been in love with. And then it got almost didactic in tone about trans stuff, which while welcome was a jarring change of tone from the mystery club teen stuff. I guess I wouldn’t have missed this, but only because there are so few trans books out there now. Although definitely read it if you are interested in eating disorders. That part was the most compelling to me. She also squeezed in a ghost suffragette and a bizarre magic school bus-like journey through the body. Basically lots of good ideas strung together too randomly.… (meer)