KING BRO!

Marcus makes a best friend who doesn’t know that Marcus is trans.

Eleven-year-old Marcus is visiting Malmö, Sweden, with his mom for the summer. Away from his home in Stockholm, Marcus can be himself, without telling anyone that he’s transgender. He meets Mikkel, a rowdy boy a little older than him, and they quickly become close friends. But when Mikkel sees Marcus’ pre-transition passport photo, he feels lied to and betrayed. The basic plot is recognizable from decades-old trans media but transposed onto tween boys, luckily with a happy ending. Narrating in a frank, breathlessly fast manner, Marcus is a likable protagonist, though his voice doesn’t always feel realistically adolescent. While the book attempts to present a message of acceptance toward trans people (as well as a lesson about not judging people with other dialects, a holdover from the original Swedish that will fly over most young American readers’ heads), the storyline is cliched and inadvertently implies that Marcus did something wrong by not initially sharing that he’s trans. Several insensitive moments crop up, such as Marcus referring to his soft-spoken babysitter, who apparently has obsessive-compulsive disorder, as a “crazy, half-mute person.” The story of the boys’ developing friendship does shine out from underneath, but it’s not worth digging to find it.

Too much chaff, not enough wheat.