I Wish You All the Best

Overview

Mason Deaver's debut novel follows Ben De Backer, a high school senior whose short, three-word declaration to their parents — "I am nonbinary" — costs them their home. Cut off and unmoored, Ben moves in with Hannah, an older sister they barely know, and her husband, a stranger's household that becomes an unlikely refuge.

Much of the story lives in the quiet aftermath: Ben managing an anxiety disorder, guarding their identity from a new school, and relearning trust with a sibling separated by years and distance. Deaver keeps the focus tight and interior, letting Ben's caution and exhaustion set the pace of the narrative.

That caution unravels when Nathan, an outgoing classmate, wedges his way into Ben's carefully guarded routine. Their friendship, and the slow-building romance it becomes, gives the novel its warmth, balancing the earlier chapters' rawness with a portrait of connection built on patience rather than rescue.

Identity, Family Rupture, and Chosen Support

The novel sits within a wave of contemporary YA that centers nonbinary and transgender protagonists not as concepts to be explained but as people navigating ordinary adolescence under extraordinary strain. Deaver, who is nonbinary, has spoken about writing the book they needed as a teenager, and that intent shapes the book's emphasis on interiority over spectacle — Ben's anxiety and grief are treated with the same weight as their gender identity.

The book is also notable for depicting family rejection without resolving it neatly; Ben's parents remain largely offstage and unreconciled, which shifts the story's definition of family toward the sister, brother-in-law, and friend who choose to show up. That structure has made the novel a frequent point of comparison to other coming-out narratives that favor tidier reconciliations, and part of its critical reception has centered on how it handles hope without pretending rupture can simply be undone.

Why I Wish You All the Best Has Been Challenged

Objections to the novel center overwhelmingly on its transgender and nonbinary content. Challengers have argued that a nonbinary protagonist, and the book's matter-of-fact use of they/them pronouns, promote a viewpoint on gender they consider inappropriate for school-age readers, sometimes framing the book's inclusion in a library as an endorsement of a particular ideology rather than a work of fiction.

A second, related line of objection concerns the book's treatment of mental health and family conflict, with some challengers citing the depiction of parental rejection and Ben's anxiety disorder as too dark or distressing for younger students, even as others have raised it specifically alongside LGBTQ content as grounds for restricting access. In this catalog, the title has drawn 3 state-level and 3 district-level challenges, most often as part of broader efforts to remove or restrict books featuring transgender characters from school shelves.