Twelve-year-old Ana is a competitive figure skater. Her skills have progressed enough that she’s going to a new rink, to continue training with her coach and meet with a famed choreographer from overseas. Unlike her best friend and the other skaters she meets at the new rink, Ana’s family struggles with money- she ends up helping teach a class of beginners to offset the cost, but still worries about it and know her mom works too hard to keep her in classes, pay for her practice time on the ice, costumes and more. So when her new choreography and the accompanying outfit don’t feel right to her, Ana is hesitant to speak up, worried that they literally can’t afford to start over. But the more she tries to skate to this delicate music in the pretty dress, the more uncomfortable she becomes. Then she meets Hayden, a trans boy in one of the skate classes. When she wears the wrong name tag by mistake, Hayden calls her by a boy’s name, and Ana doesn’t correct him- she’s surprised at how pleased that makes her feel. She starts to wonder about her gender identity, and to explore what it would mean to proclaim herself nonbinary- but it takes her a while to find the courage to tell people. In the meantime, she’s kept up the pretense with Hayden long enough that it gets harder and harder to tell him about that mistake, and her relationship with her ‘best’ friend back at the old rink has become estranged. In the end she had to tell everybody the truth- about the mistaken deception, how she really feels about things, how she wants to change her skating program. Some parts of this seemed a little- too easy? (and a few other readers agree with me). I mostly enjoyed reading about the skating competitions, how she practiced and learned her moves, working with the music, some of the training techniques and struggles the skaters go through. Like a previous read, this one was also written by an author who is a figure skater, and you can really tell.
Borrowed from the public library.
