I am J

I am J
by Cris Beam
Little, Brown, and Company, 2011

Genre: Fiction

Honors:

• Booklist starred 12/01/10
• Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books starred 02/01/11
• Horn Book 03/01/11
• Kirkus Reviews starred 02/01/11
• Publishers Weekly 01/31/11
• School Library Journal 02/01/11
• Teacher Librarian 02/01/12

Review: Cris Beam tells a very heart-wrenching tale of Jeni, who prefers to be known as "J," a transgender who was born a girl and grows up feeling more and more desperate to find a way to change his body to reflect the way he feels inside. As his efforts to stop his female body from developing, he struggles to fit in at school, where he is teased and called a fag by his peers. What's worse, he is afraid to even begin to try and articulate who he is to his family, who are openly opposed to the homosexual and transgender lifestyle. His best girl friend, Melissa, is his first love and the only one who shows any promise of being able to come to terms with his transgender identity. As J experiments with altering his appearance and attempting to "pass" as a male in a new area, his relationships with Melissa and his family begin to unravel so fast that he decides that the only course for him to take is to run away and live in a shelter while he sorts out his life and finds a way to become more masculine.

Opinion: This one may be best for either more mature thirteen and fourteen-year-olds who have the patience to get through it, or for older teens as it is pretty long and has a lot of complex language, some pretty descriptive text about body parts and detailed thoughts about romance.

Ideas: There are some really good resources for transgender youth, as well as the conveyance of a lot of basic information related to the transgender lifestyle. This novel could serve as the basis for an exercise in looking up the terms in the book for clarification, such as terms related to sex change and the hormones used in making one sex more like the opposite sex.