This is good! Though it's not as good as Milks's short story collection, and the SFFH elements don't cohere (for me) as well as they did there. I'm also just not hugely compelled by transmasc stuff around girlhood, which the end of this leans hard into -- even as a transmasc who transitioned as an adult I don't really think of myself as having ever been a girl in that sense? Though it's true that I read Ann M. Martin and had times when I was a fairly feminine little boy.

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. ( )

Megan Milks' Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body is a sort of chimera, made of disparate parts that don't seem to belong together, yet they do. The publisher's blurb for the book describes it as a reimagining of "nineties adolescence—mashing up girl group series, choose-your-own-adventures, and chronicles of anorexia—in a queer and trans coming-of-age tale like no other. An interrogation of girlhood and nostalgia, dysmorphia and dysphoria, this debut novel puzzles through the weird, ever-evasive questions of growing up." The parts of this mash-up/chimera include

• The story of the title's Margaret, whose friends are abandoning their "Girls Can Solve Anything Club" detective team as they move from into high school and her worsening eating disorder.

• Write-ups of the club's case files that could inspire any number of episodes of The X Files.

• Margaret's time in a residential facility that treats eating disorders.

• A sequence in which the facility's resident ghost lures Margaret and two of her friends to a lecture on the history of the U.S. women's suffrage movement.

• A journey following that lecture that takes Margaret and company through a gigantic digestive tract.

• A complex reflection in what I assume to be Milks' own voice considering issues of gender and identity that draws on recent research in the field, and which uses a voice that is simultaneously personal and academic.

Basically, it's a wild ride that demands a lot from readers, but that also delivers a rich kind of complexity that a simpler structure simply couldn't offer. Put in the work and you'll reap the benefits. I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via Edelweiss; the opinions are my own. ( )