This is a very character driven novel.Â Riley and friends are the focus more than the plot.Â Bec is a new friend at school.Â She’s a social outcast and she’s in a band.Â She befriends Riley and becomes a potential love interest.Â Solo is a former outcast turned athlete who befriends Riley.Â This causes tension with his friends on the football team.

Riley is a congressman’s child in a conservative part of California.Â The congressman is pushing for educational reform so Riley is taken out of private school and put in a public one for the first time.Â First day jitters are worse because Riley is gender fluid and is unsure of how to present on the first day of school.Â Within minutes of arriving at school, Riley overhears people guessing, “Is that a boy or a girl?” and one person decides to use “It” instead of any pronoun.Īs part of Riley’s therapy after a suicide attempt, the psychologist recommends starting a blog.Â The second post goes viral.Â (Yeah, right.)Â Riley becomes an online star and eventually is outed publicly.Â It is a huge problem because Riley’s parents didn’t know.Īn interesting aspect of the book is that the gender that Riley was assigned at birth is never stated.Â The author never uses any pronouns to refer to Riley.Â I’m extra impressed by this because it was hard to write this review without pronouns, let alone a whole book.Â (Some reviews I’ve read have taken issue with this because pronouns are a difficult part of life for some people.) Riley must make a choice: walk away from what the blog has createdâ€”a lifeline, new friends, a cause to believe inâ€”or stand up, come out, and risk everything. But just as Rileyâ€™s starting to settle in at schoolâ€”even developing feelings for a mysterious outcastâ€”the blog goes viral, and an unnamed commenter discovers Rileyâ€™s real identity, threatening exposure. On the advice of a therapist, Riley starts an anonymous blog to vent those pent-up feelings and tell the truth of what itâ€™s REALLY like to be a gender fluid teenager. And between starting a new school and having a congressman father running for reelection in uber-conservative Orange County, the pressureâ€”media and otherwiseâ€”is building up in Rileyâ€™s so-called â€œnormalâ€ life. The thing isâ€¦Riley isnâ€™t exactly out yet. Some days Riley identifies as a boy, and others as a girl. Riley Cavanaugh is many things: Punk rock. The first thing youâ€™re going to want to know about me is: Am I a boy, or am I a girl?

Riley cavanaugh symptoms of being human