Am I blue?
by Marion Dane Bauer
Young adult · ages 12–18 · grades 7–12 · 800L · 1999
Why we'd hand it over
A quietly powerful story about a closeted gay teen in 1999 — still one of the most honest middle-grade explorations of early identity recognition, with zero didacticism and real peer cruelty that doesn't sanitize the cost of coming out.