Alice Austen Lived Here

Overview

Sam is nonbinary and mostly unbothered about it — their family accepts who they are, even if that acceptance comes with the usual chores and homework. What Sam is less at peace with is a history class built entirely around the achievements of dead straight white men, a curriculum that leaves no room for anyone who looks or loves like Sam does.

A borough-wide contest to design a new statue for Staten Island gives Sam an opening. Researching a subject who breaks the mold, Sam lands on Alice Austen, a real-life photographer whose preserved home reveals a decades-long relationship with another woman. The contest becomes a way into a past Sam didn't know existed.

What starts as a school project turns into something more personal: a search for continuity between Sam's own life and the queer lives that came before, alongside best friend TJ, who shares Sam's identity and Sam's stake in the outcome.

History, Visibility, and Who Gets a Statue

The novel uses its statue-contest premise to ask a pointed question: whose lives get carved into permanent civic memory, and whose get left out of the textbook entirely? By anchoring that question in a real historical figure and an actual house-museum, the book blurs the line between fiction and documented history, suggesting that the queer past Sam is looking for was never actually hidden — just underrepresented in the places young people are taught to look.

It's a natural extension of Alex Gino's earlier work introducing young readers to transgender and nonbinary characters, here widening the lens from personal identity to communal and historical belonging. The book treats Sam's coming-into-understanding not as an isolated coming-of-age arc but as part of a much longer lineage.

Why Alice Austen Lived Here Has Been Challenged

Objections to this title, which has drawn 3 state-level and 5 district-level challenges in this catalog, center on its nonbinary protagonist and matter-of-fact treatment of a same-sex relationship in the historical record it explores. Critics raising these challenges have generally framed the book's gender identity content and LGBTQ+ subject matter as inappropriate for the age group it's shelved for, echoing objections leveled at other Gino titles featuring transgender and nonbinary characters. The book's classroom-set framing — a student pushing back on a history curriculum — has also made it a target in broader disputes over how gender and sexuality are addressed in school settings.