If I Can Give You That

Overview

Michael Gray Bulla's debut novel follows Gael, a seventeen-year-old transgender boy who has spent his senior year keeping most people at arm's length. He shows up to a meeting of Plus, a local support group for LGBTQIA+ teens, mostly to appease his best friend, with no real intention of saying much to a room full of strangers.

What draws him out instead is Declan, whose easy warmth pulls Gael into a new set of friendships he didn't expect to want. As that connection deepens into something romantic, Gael is simultaneously trying to hold his family together: caring for a mother whose depression is worsening, and fending off a father who has resurfaced after years of estrangement, hoping to rebuild a relationship Gael isn't sure he can trust.

The novel builds toward a loss that forces Gael to reconsider the guardedness that has defined him, asking whether he can let the people who've shown up for him actually in.

Identity, Chosen Family, and the Weight of Care

Beneath its coming-of-age framework, the book is preoccupied with the labor of caretaking that often falls on kids before they're ready for it. Gael's transness is central to his experience, but it isn't the sole source of his isolation; his guardedness is just as much a product of parenting a parent through mental illness and of learning, early, not to expect much from his father. The support group and his new circle of friends function as a counterweight to that isolation, modeling the idea that family can be assembled rather than only inherited.

Bulla situates this within a specific setting, a conservative high school in Tennessee, which sharpens the stakes of Gael's caution: opening up is not simply an emotional risk but a social one. The book joins a wave of recent YA fiction, alongside writers like Kacen Callender and Mason Deaver, that centers transgender protagonists in stories where gender identity is one thread among several, rather than the entirety of the plot.

Why If I Can Give You That Has Been Challenged

Reviewers have generally received the novel as a sincere and unflashy portrait of a teenager learning to trust, but that same candor is what has drawn scrutiny from those seeking to restrict its availability. The objections raised against the book center on its transgender protagonist and its treatment of a same-sex romance, subjects that some challengers argue are inappropriate for a school-age audience or at odds with their own views on gender and sexuality. Related concerns have pointed to the book's depiction of a parent's mental illness and family estrangement as heavy material for teen readers, though the recurring thread across objections has been discomfort with its LGBTQIA+ content rather than any single scene or passage. In this catalog, the novel has been the subject of a challenge recorded in 1 state and 1 school district.