Act Cool

Overview

August Greene has earned a place at a sought-after performing arts school in New York City, a dream opportunity for a young actor. The arrangement comes with a painful catch: his parents, uneasy with his transgender identity, will only let him live with his aunt in the city if he agrees not to transition while he's there.

August decides he can manage the part, presenting himself the way his parents expect while building friendships with classmates who know him differently. The bargain requires constant recalibration of who he can be depending on who is watching.

As rehearsals and relationships deepen, the distance between August's rehearsed self and his private self grows harder to maintain, forcing him to weigh the cost of continued performance against the risk of losing his family's fragile acceptance.

Character and Craft

The novel leans on its theatrical setting to dramatize a familiar adolescent tension: the gap between the self one performs for others and the self one privately knows. For August, that gap is not merely social but existential, since the role he's been assigned by his parents requires denying a core fact about who he is. The performing arts school setting sharpens this irony, placing a character skilled at inhabiting other people's stories inside a home life that permits him no story of his own.

Coming from the author of Stay Gold, the book continues an interest in trans adolescence rendered through the pressures of family, institution, and peer group rather than through a single dramatic reveal. Its reception as a Rainbow Book List selection and a Bank Street Best Books honoree points to its place within a growing body of YA fiction that centers trans protagonists as the ones narrating their own coming-of-age, rather than as subjects of someone else's story.

Why Act Cool Has Been Challenged

Gender identity is the throughline of most objections to this novel: some readers have argued that a story built around a teenage character's transition, and the conditional acceptance he receives from his parents, is inappropriate reading for school-age audiences or amounts to an endorsement of transition itself. Related concerns have focused on the book's frank handling of a teen's inner life and relationships as he navigates who he can safely be in different settings, which some challengers have characterized as mature content unsuited to younger readers. Within the collections this catalog tracks, the novel has drawn 2 state-level and 2 district-level challenges, reflecting a broader pattern in which books centering transgender characters face scrutiny disproportionate to their actual content.