Getting It

Overview

Getting It follows Carlos, a high school junior fixated on winning over Roxy, a girl he's certain is out of his league. Watching a reality makeover show gives him an idea: recruit Sal, a classmate widely assumed to be gay and treated accordingly by their peers, to transform him into someone worth noticing.

The arrangement starts as a trade — social cover for Sal, a crash course in style and self-assurance for Carlos — but Alex Sanchez complicates it quickly. As the two spend more time together, the transactional premise gives way to something neither boy anticipated: an actual friendship, built on the kind of honesty that Carlos's pursuit of Roxy never required of him.

The novel keeps its plot small and its stakes personal, tracking how a self-serving scheme forces its narrator to reckon with assumptions he hadn't examined before making them.

Beyond the Makeover Premise

Sanchez, known for young-adult fiction centered on gay and questioning teens, uses the makeover-show setup as a hook rather than the point. The real material is what happens when a straight protagonist's curiosity about a gay peer starts out purely instrumental — Sal is useful before he is understood. The book asks its narrator, and by extension its reader, to notice the difference between having a "gay friend" as an accessory and having a friend who happens to be gay.

That shift also puts pressure on Carlos's own ideas about masculinity and desirability, since the confidence he's chasing turns out to have less to do with Sal's coaching than with simply being honest with people. The novel sits within a broader wave of 2000s YA that tried to normalize queer characters for straight audiences by routing the story through a straight narrator's education — a strategy that has drawn its own scrutiny for centering that narrator's growth over Sal's interiority.

Why Getting It Has Been Challenged

Objections to the novel center on its frank treatment of sexual orientation and its inclusion of a gay teenage character as a sympathetic, central figure, with some challengers framing any positive depiction of a gay student as inappropriate for school libraries. Complaints have also pointed to the book's teenage language and its discussion of dating, attraction, and peer bullying as unsuitable for the age group, arguing the content is too mature or too focused on sexuality for a school setting. In this catalog, Getting It has been challenged or banned in 3 states and 3 districts, reflecting the broader wave of scrutiny directed at YA titles featuring LGBTQ characters and storylines.