Good Different by Meg Eden Kuyatt
Summary: Selah knows her rules for being normal. She always, always sticks to them. This means keeping her feelings locked tightly inside, despite the way they build up inside her as each school day goes on, so that she has to run to the bathroom and hide in the stall until she can calm down. So that she has to tear off her normal-person mask the second she gets home from school, and listen to her favorite pop song on repeat, trying to recharge. Selah feels like a dragon stuck in a world of humans, but she knows how to hide it. Until the day she explodes and hits a fellow student. Selah’s friends pull away from her, her school threatens expulsion, and her comfortable, familiar world starts to crumble. But as Selah starts to figure out more about who she is, she comes to understand that different doesn’t mean damaged. Can she get her school to understand that, too, before it’s too late?
How I adore this book! The author’s gorgeous use of imagery puts us directly into Selah’s point of view. I felt the itchiness of that school uniform and smelled that sour milk big-box store smell. Every detail, from Selah’s dragon metaphors to Pop’s four-colored pen to a through-the-bathroom-stall-wall conversation at FantasyCon, is pitch perfect. This deeply realized and beautifully rendered OwnVoices novel should be on every reading list.
GOOD DIFFERENT is out now.
Kathy MacMillan 