A review by lucasgarner
Stay Gold by Tobly McSmith

4.0

I’m being nice/biased again with my rating, as this one is really more of a 3-star rating, but being part of the LGBTQ+ community it’s hard to not completely love this novel. Sure, it’s horribly cliche, unoriginal (minus the whole starring a transgender teen thing), cheesy, predictable, and the ending is wrapped up in way too nice of a bow, however, it’s hard to not fall in love with the stupidity of it all when it’s so damn cute and wonderfully representative (except for non-binary, which gets a disappointing few shout outs with no explanation). This is hardly a novel, and more of a guidebook for straight cis people to understand why they shouldn’t be assholes to queer people, and the consequences if they are. The writing is very bare bones, and there were so many places I wanted to the author to dig deeper, but it’s all a good start. If this hadn’t been about a transgender teen, I would probably give it 2 stars (to reiterate, heavily biased here), but it’s so good to have this novel out there, and for visibility to keep increasing.