A review by lixard
Stay Gold by Tobly McSmith

challenging dark lighthearted medium-paced
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.5

  • advertised as a romantic ya story between trans boy and a cis girl of different parts of the hs hierarchy......... what we got was much darker and more traumatic than promised
  • i am not trans so i redirect you to check out some ownvoices reviewers but after reading/watching other such reviews,, i am better able to catch the unaddressed misogyny, (internalized and external) transphobia, and how the characters never seemed to grow out of that mindset or properly apologize for their actions and words
  • it felt like that era of fanfiction that wrote super traumatic whump for the angst that you would read and cry to, which is valid in its own way, but definitely not forewarned, which seems problematic, esp. when targeted towards young (trans) audiences 
  • extra 0.5 stars because their flirty banter was nerdy and fun and made me chuckle and the writing (audiobook) was able to wring some tears from my eyes; the rest of the banter was a little far on what "teen-speak" is, though based on my old croon's 4 year old memory of high school 
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