High-school junior Arden Grey learns how to recognize, set, and push her personal boundaries in Stoeve's (Between Perfect and Real, 2021) second novel. Arden has always been happy spending time with her best friend, Jamie, who is trans, and honing her photography skills en though she never shows anyone her art. When Arden's cold and demanding mother abandons the family and Jamie starts a romantic relationship with a classmate, Arden must learn how to trust herself and her voice. As she navigates the complicated, often embarrassing feelings of being left behind in her friendship with Jamie, Arden also tries to figure out if and how her asexual identity fits into these feelings. Another layer of complexity is added when Arden begins to suspect that Jamie may be in an emotionally abusive relationship, a revelation that causes her to reassess her own unhealthy relationship with her mother. Stoeve addresses the contours of emotional abuse with subtlety and grace, and Arden's personal journey, which takes a hopeful turn, will appeal greatly to fans of character-driven stories.

Adolescents navigate abuse and asexuality.Seattle high school junior Arden is dealing with a lot. Alongside her father and younger brother, she is struggling with her mother's decision to leave. Her best friend, Jamie, has started dating Caroline, his first romantic relationship since transitioning. And Arden knows that she doesn't want to be sexual with anyone, but she still has crushes on girls. This muted novel has a slow start and at first may seem to be a blend of familiar realistic young adult tropes with updated gender identities and sexual orientations, but it relentlessly builds tension as Arden carefully unpicks the realities of both her identity and the common experiences of unhealthy, abusive relationships. Most main characters are White, while new friend Marc, who reads as Black, provides another example of asexuality. Arden's romantic interest is a pansexual Mexican American girl with precocious communication skills. Refreshingly, all the conflict involves realistic interpersonal dynamics, with transphobia and other oppressions taking a back seat. The patient unraveling of Arden's friendships and relationships, as well as the neatly wrapped up resolution, feels simultaneously expected and deeply satisfying, and while neither of the abusers is given much complexity, the depictions of the dynamics involved can help readers identify toxic relationships in their own lives.Quiet and powerful. (author's note, resources) (Fiction. 14-18)