It's senior year for Kristen Lattimer. She's just been crowned Homecoming Queen and is looking at a track scholarship to college next year. The night after the Homecoming dance, Kristen decides it's time to lose her virginity to her boyfriend Sam. What should be a romantic night is ruined when she experiences terrible, agonizing pain. This leads her to seek a gynecological exam. The news is shocking: Kristen is intersex.
Although outwardly she looks like a girl, she has no uterus, and blood tests show that her chromosomes read XY. Thus begins Kristen's painful journey of discovery: not only to learn more about her diagnosis, but to learn just what defines one's gender.
At first Kristen tells no one - not even Sam - about her diagnosis. However, one drunken night, she spills the beans to her two best friends, Vee and Faith. Soon the news is spread all over school, and the bullying begins, both at school and online. Even her track coach says Kristen cannot participate with the track team because other schools have filed complaints about cheating.
The author of None of the Above, I.W. Gregorio, is herself a surgeon, and her medical knowledge comes through in the scenes with Kristen and her doctors. I felt that these scenes, although factual, were a little too dry in their exposition. It's quite obvious that Gregorio is trying to educate the reader by dispelling many rumors and myths about those who are intersex. There are other plot points that seem a bit too pat, as if she was going through a check sheet of YA tropes: Homecoming queen? Check. Happens to be reading Merchant of Venice is English class with its themes of gender identity? Check. Parent who is supportive but distant? Check.
I like that this book explores an issue so rarely discussed in YA lit. Gregorio is one of the founding members of the We Need Diverse Books campaign, so I applaud her efforts. But I think it's obvious that Gregorio has a medical background and very few YA titles to her name. Point more mature teen readers to Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides for additional reading on this theme.
