By Kacen Callender
After his older brother dies suddenly, a twelve-year-old in rural Louisiana decides the brother came back as a dragonfly, and over the months that follow he starts to face that his brother is really gone and that he himself is gay.
King, short for Kingston James, is twelve, and his sixteen-year-old brother Khalid has died suddenly. King can't take it in, so he decides Khalid turned into one of the dragonflies down by the bayou, and he goes there to talk to him. Before he died, Khalid told King to stop spending time with his best friend Sandy, because people at school were calling Sandy gay, and King is afraid he might be gay too. Then Sandy disappears. King finds him hiding out to get away from his violent father, and helps him. The two of them build a small, secret world by the water, and King slowly stops running from who he is.
The grief here is written from the inside, and it never talks down. King's belief that Khalid became a dragonfly is the kind of story a grieving child might tell himself when a loss is too big to look at straight, and watching him slowly let the truth be real is quietly devastating and then, by the end, a little healing. Around that, Callender works in race, a father's cruelty, and a boy coming to accept that he's gay, and all of it stays inside a twelve-year-old's voice the whole way through. It won the National Book Award in 2020.