THE (UN)POPULAR VOTE

National politics writ small and queer: Mark Adams wants to be out and proud as a pansexual trans guy.

But his congressman father, a California Democrat who is eyeing the White House, sees his son as a liability and forces Mark to transfer to Utopia High in order to be stealth. Mark agrees to hide his trans history but still joins an unofficial club for queer students (shunning the Gay-Straight Alliance as straight-people ally cred). When “high-femme fag” sophomore Benji is targeted, politics-obsessed Mark, who is White, decides to run for student body president—against teenage stand-ins for Clinton and Trump—on a platform of systemic change. The slow-moving plot contains paragraphs about Leibniz, the Electoral College, a transmasculine response to feminist statements about toxic masculinity, and discussions of identity and privilege that some readers will find arduous to slog through. There are moments of strength, power, and deep emotion sprinkled throughout, but much patience is required to get there. Mark, his family, and other supporting characters feel like carefully crafted displays of intentions and ideals rather than fully developed and urgently vital human beings, though the similarly thoughtful approach to climactic moments is more successful. There are certainly some teenagers who will enjoy the heights of rarefied nerdery that this novel achieves, though, and a limited audience will find all of their dreams fulfilled.

A challenging read but not without merit.