I'm also not sure that the voices felt particularly authentic to the age group. During Essie's half, Ollie describes themself as "a girl who's a boy" and Essie decides that makes sense based on her knowledge of Ollie - perhaps not the most helpful explanation for young readers encountering the idea of the gender spectrum for the first time. The concepts around gender and nonbinary identity were also much better described in Ollie's part of the book. The older side characters like Annabella or Ollie's brother Max often came off as better developed than most of the young characters none of the friends, for example, seemed to be particularly well-rounded or have all that much to differentiate them. Rather than a full character, she seemed much more a vehicle for the Issues of the book. Essie on the other hand.there was a moment where she described something as being "classic Essie," and I found myself thinking that I had absolutely no idea if that was true or not. Overall, I found Ollie much more strongly characterized than Essie, and their issues with parental involvement and trying to balance their advocacy with being a normal kid were laid out nicely. Ollie's stage combat class, for example, is a pretty significant part of their section, despite not being mentioned even off-handedly in Essie's - it's an interesting writing challenge to have one perspective highlight or minimize certain things versus the other, but it felt a bit off balance to have certain aspects seemingly not exist at all. I also found having the entire first half as Essie's perspective and the entire second half from Ollie's to be a bit of an odd choice: it ended up with some scenes essentially recreated in the second half without much being added by the perspective change alongside plotlines which are not even hinted at in the first part. There's a difference between a book being fast paced and one with scenes so short that it doesn't really feel that there's time for the emotions and ideas within to settle. The basic idea of the book was strong and necessary - there are certainly not enough books with nonbinary characters, especially as love interests, nor are there many with cis characters trying to understand a crush on/romantic interest in a nonbinary character, particularly at the middle grade level - but the execution was mediocre.
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