A review by wardenred
Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender

emotional hopeful reflective fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

“The issue is that we’ve never really gotten to see our own stories,” Declan tells me. “We have to make those stories ourselves.“

Ugh. Kids these days. How I envy them sometimes. I wish I had books like this growing up!

This was an absolutely lovely story with so much packed into it, and such a wonderful balance between dealing with the pain transphobia causes and experiencing the joy of self-discovery and settling into your skin. I found Felix an extremely relatable character between his struggles to figure out the details of his gender identity, and his worries about possibly having one marginalization too many, and how he reacted to his mother abandoning him by gravitating toward the choices that will get him hurt when it comes to feelings, and the whole big damn mess he created with that love triangle / catfishing scheme. A lot of it threw me right back into my own messy teenage years.

I really loved how flawed and messy in that uniquely teenage way all the central characters were, and how alive they all felt on the page. At the same time, some of those emotional peaks, especially in the second half of the book, sometimes made it difficult to stay immerse—which I think wasn’t so much the book’s flaw as just my experience as an adult reader. I had to remind myself that yeah, that’s exactly what teens can be like. Everything is always so extreme, so larger than life, and nope, they can’t just temper down the feelings and talk it out because they’re *still learning how to do that.* Communication is a skill, and the characters in this book definitely work on developing it in a realistic, relatable way.

There were also some structural tricks here I really liked, such as the very first scene doing so much foreshadowing in terms of everything from plot to theme, or specific scenes kind of mirroring each other, like the one where Felix has an important face-to-face conversation with Ezra while texting Declan and the one where he has an equally important face-to-face interaction with Declan while pretty much talking to Ezra in his head. At the same time, in the late part of the story, if I’m very strict, I have to admit there were some parts where the structure got sloppy-ish as the emotions heightened. I really don’t want to be strict, though. I just want to be happy this book exists. <3
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