I Wish You All the Best

by Mason Deaver

ISBN 978-1-338-30613-2

“Everything looks so bright and new and put together. Like everything here has a place and that’s exactly where it belongs. And I’m the extra piece that doesn’t fit in.”

It is New Year’s Eve, and Ben has finally worked up the courage, with a little help from their best online friend, Mariam. They are going to tell their parents that they are nonbinary. But they never expected to find themself barefoot on the winter streets after their parents throw them out when they won’t take it back and pretend that it was all a joke. Fortunately, Ben’s estranged older sister Hannah is willing to take them in, and Ben has to start their last semester of senior year at a new high school where Hannah’s husband is the chemistry teacher. But they decide not to come out at the new school, a decision that is made even more complicated by Ben’s growing feelings for their first new friend, the handsome and ebullient Nathan Allan.

Despite its centrality to the story, the romance between Ben and Nathan is quiet and slow moving. Honestly, Ben’s mental energy was so tied up in recovering from trauma and trying to figure themself out that they just didn’t seem like they had a lot of mental bandwidth for a romantic entanglement. That said, Nathan was a vibrant, joyful character, and I could totally see Ben becoming wrapped up in his light and energy, and becoming extremely invested in keeping his good opinion. The possibility of a deeper relationship feels more tangible by the end of the book, but of course it is hard for two people to truly connect when one of them is keeping a big secret that is like a wall between them.

One thing that I Wish You All the Best does really well is highlight just how unnecessarily gendered language can be in small, quotidian ways that creep into everything. From binary checkboxes on forms, to endearments like “little bro” or “dude” and “my prince,” gendered language is a minefield that is slowly killing Ben with a thousand thoughtless cuts. There are dozens of cringe inducing moments where Ben is casually misgendered because they can’t face coming out at their new school after being brutally rejected by their parents. It only hurts the more because these are people who would not deliberately harm Ben, but simply do not know better because this is just normative language.

I love sibling stories, so I was really interested in the relationship between Ben and their sister Hannah. The history of family abuse and their age difference makes their interactions at once loving and fraught. Ben’s arrival on her doorstep resurfaces Hannah’s own traumatic history with their parents, and emphasizes the differing traumas of the one who left, and the one who was left behind. I liked the way their sibling bond grew over the course of the book, especially once Ben got up the courage to openly confront their feelings of abandonment and betrayal. I would have enjoyed exploring this more, as well as Ben’s online friendship with Mariam Haidari, the YouTuber whose videos helped Ben figure out their identity. Together, Hannah and Mariam represent Ben’s past and future, and the hurdles they will have to overcome in order to get there. I would recommend this as a quiet contemporary about relationships and acceptance.