by Mason Deaver
Part of I Wish You All the Best
First published 2019
Ben De Backer says three words to their parents: I am nonbinary. Within hours, they are out of the house with nowhere to go. Ben ends up on the doorstep of their older sister Hannah and her husband Thomas, two people Ben barely knows. A new school, a new home, and an anxiety disorder that makes all of it harder. Ben's plan is simple: stay quiet, stay invisible, get through senior year. Then Nathan Allan shows up. He is funny and warm and impossible to ignore, and he decides Ben is worth knowing. The two of them start spending time together, and what began as survival starts to feel like something else. Ben still carries the weight of what their parents did. That does not go away. But Nathan is there, and Hannah is trying, and slowly Ben begins to wonder if a life that got blown apart might be getting rebuilt into something better. This is a story about rejection and recovery, about the specific loneliness of starting over, and about what it feels like when someone chooses you.
Genres: romance, coming-of-age, contemporary, young-adult, family-drama
Vibes: emotional, healing, hopeful, intimate, introspective, tender
Tropes: chosen-one, found-family, recovery-arc, slow-burn-romance
336 pages · Paperback · Push
Content warnings: anxiety, mental-illness