A review by murdersquirrrel
Stay Gold by Tobly McSmith

2.0

In general this was an okay book, the writing was not as bad as it could have been. The main issues with this book are the massive amount of trigger warnings it needs, and the marketing and cover/summary making it sound like a cute romance. It's described as a "coming-of-age teen love story about a transgender boy", and sure that's true to an extent but there is so much transphobia here from so many sources that's painful to read, including the extremely graphic assault scene near the end that has no warning. The book is entirely marketed as a cute romance and that can be really harmful if you have triggers and just go into this looking for an optimistic trans story. Also, the moral of this book seems to be that going stealth is bad for yourself and the community and it will never work out no matter what, this theme is driven home so much by everyone "supportive" in Pony's life and it's really weird to read when Max is going on about how he won't be friends with Pony anymore if he continues failing the trans community by being stealth.