Review: Parrotfish

Wittlinger, Ellen. Parrotfish. Simon & Schuster, 2007.

Books about transgender youth are few and far between. Julie Anne Peters’ Luna (Little, Brown, 2004) was the first young adult novel with a transgender main character, and there have been a handful of others with a secondary character who identifies as transgender.

Parrotfish is a welcome addition to this small body of literature. Grady is a teenage boy, trapped in the body of a girl named Angela Katz-McNair. He’s just made the difficult decision to come out at home and at school at the same time, to tell people who he really is, and to start living life as a boy. His family — particularly his mother — has difficulty accepting him as Grady. But his home life is easy compared to what he faces at school, where most of his fellow students view him as strange, at best, and perverted at worst. His best friend since early childhood rejects him, and he is bullied by Danya, a popular girl who has much of the student body under her thumb.

But Grady has a new friend in Sebastian, a short, funny kid that he’s never paid much attention to before. Sebastian is excited about Grady’s change on an intellectual level because he’s in the midst of doing a school report on the parrotfish, a species known for changing its gender from female to male in order to survive. Sebastian takes Grady under his wing, and the two become great friends.

Other students and teachers at the school show a range of reactions, from the principal who refuses to change Grady’s school records to reflect the change to the wonderful gym teacher who allows Grady to use the private shower connected to her office to change for gym. And while the students at first viewed Grady as an oddity, most of them come around to tolerating him, if not outright accepting him.

As a backdrop to Grady’s coming out story, there are some unusual subplots. There’s a bit of romance, as Grady falls hard for Kita, the girlfriend of one of the few boys other than Sebastian who is friendly to Grady. Kita shows just enough interest in Grady to make the romance sizzle a bit.

And there’s Grady’s eccentric father, who makes such a show of decorating their house for Christmas that people line up in front of their picture window every night to watch him light the fire. For the month of December, no one in the family allowed to enter the living room unless they’re decked out in full Dickensian costume.

Grady has a habit of thinking in dialog, often imagining what others must be saying about him or rewriting the words he wished he had said. This skill comes in handy in the book’s resolution, which underscores the themes of learning to accept change, to stop playing proscribed roles, and to be oneself.