So Hard to Say Author:Alex Sanchez, Stephen Swintek From Booklist — Most young adolescents routinely agonize over questions like "Who am I?" and "What am I?" Sometimes, as Sanchez dramatizes in this story of emotional exploration, the answers are difficult to discover. — Newly arrived in California, eighth-grader Frederick meets and becomes friends with a girl named Xio. When Xio develops a major c... more »rush on Frederick, their relationship takes an awkward turn with Frederick finding it hard to reciprocate Xio's feelings because he's attracted to a boy. Is he gay? Can a boy and a girl be "just" friends?
By alternating between Xio's and Frederick's first-person point of view, Sanchez does a good job of exploring both the evolution of their tangled emotions and the nature of friendship. Ultimately, Xio emerges as the more interesting character, since Frederick is burdened by a bundle of stereotypes: he's asthmatic, dotes on interior decoration, is a neat freak, etc. Nevertheless, Sanchez understands the inner lives of kids and, in writing one of the few middle-grade novels on this aspect of sexual identity, he does a service for questioning youth.« less
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