By A. J. Sass
A twelve-year-old figure skating champion is handed a princess-themed program, meets a trans boy at the rink, and starts working out who Ana really is.
Ana-Marie Jin is the reigning US Juvenile champion, up before dawn, landing jumps most skaters can't. Then the coach hands down next season's program: princess themed, dress and all. Ana hates it and can't quite explain why. Around the same time a new skater shows up at the rink, Hayden, a trans boy, and Hayden takes one look and assumes Ana is a boy too. Ana doesn't correct him, and being that person around Hayden feels better than anything has in a long time. So Ana ends up running two lives on the same sheet of ice. Meanwhile the skating fees keep piling up on a single mom who can barely cover them, a big competition is coming, and telling the truth might mean losing years of work. A. J. Sass is a nonbinary skater, and the ice and the questions both read like the real thing.
It's a real sports novel first. The training, the politics of a rink, the nerves before a program, the money behind all of it, are specific and true, so a skating-obsessed child gets exactly the book they came for. The gender thread isn't bolted on top of that. Figure skating sorts everyone into boys' and girls' categories from the first day, and Ana keeps running into it, so the question grows straight out of the sport. Sass lets Ana stay uncertain for the whole book, which is rare, and never stops to teach a lesson. A child who's questioning may find a lot of themselves here. A child who isn't still gets a strong story about how heavy a secret gets the longer you keep it.