Rainie Oet's authentic, heartrending middle-grade novel-in-verse, Glitch Girl!, features a neurodivergent "nonbinary girl" who desperately wants to be loved as her true self: "someone good, in between girl and boy, and closer to girl."
Protagonist J-- (her "old 'boy' name" is crossed out) narrates with stark, sometimes brutal honesty her experiences from 2004 to 2007 in fifth through seventh grade. She depicts her world through two lenses: her intense crush on friend Junie, and her devotion to building virtual amusement parks in her Coaster Boss computer game. At her new school, J-- resolves to "try to keep perfectly still" despite ADHD-fueled stimming. When J-- games, though, she is in complete control; she can restart each day unburdened from embarrassment about how her dysregulation and impulsivity impact the people around her. "My mind is/ a broken mirror, reflecting a thousand/ corners of the world at once," J-- admits. "Sometimes it's magical. Mostly it's horrible."
Oet masterfully uses the game as an allegory for J--'s struggle to accept her intersecting identities; J-- oscillates between wanting to please the virtual park guests and wanting to purposely injure or destroy them. The medium echoes the turmoil with punchy, blunt poems that give way to longer, lyrical passages rich with metaphor. This moving debut is inspired by Oet's own adolescence and will likely resonate with mature middle-grade readers who yearn for complex characters and vivid figurative language. --Kieran Slattery, freelance reviewer, teacher, co-creator of Gender Inclusive Classrooms