Just Ash

Overview

Ash Bishop is a Salem, Massachusetts teenager with an ordinary set of enthusiasms: soccer, local ghost-story lore, and a crush on a friend named Michelle. He is also intersex, a fact he has always known about himself but never treated as a defining feature. That changes abruptly during his junior year, when he gets his period in the boys' locker room in front of his entire soccer team.

The incident turns Ash into a subject of gossip and scrutiny almost overnight. Teammates and teachers begin to look at him differently, and even his mother suggests he might be happier if he simply presented as a girl. Isolated by the people closest to him, Ash starts to feel like an outsider in his own life.

Searching for footing, he turns to family history, specifically to Bridget Bishop, his ancestor and the first person executed in the Salem witch trials. Her defiance of the norms expected of her, and the fate she met because of it, becomes a lens through which Ash starts to understand his own situation and decide what he owes to his own voice.

A Modern Reckoning With an Old Salem Story

Just Ash sets a contemporary coming-of-age story against the backdrop of the very history that made Salem notorious, using the witch trials not as costume-drama atmosphere but as a mirror. Bridget Bishop's documented last words, an instruction to keep silent, give the novel its central tension: whether staying quiet about who you are is a form of safety or a slow erosion of self. Ash's arc is less about discovering his identity, which he already understands, than about deciding how visible and vocal to be about it in a community that has suddenly decided his body is everyone's business.

The book is notable in young adult literature for centering an intersex protagonist at all, a population rarely represented in fiction aimed at teenagers. Author Sol Santana, who is intersex, draws on that perspective to render Ash's inner life with specificity rather than treating his biology as a plot device or a mystery to be solved. Reviewers have responded to that specificity, describing the novel as an unusually candid and sympathetic portrait of an experience most readers, and even most authors, rarely attempt to depict.

Why Just Ash Has Been Challenged

Reviewers have praised the novel precisely for the candor that has made it a target elsewhere: the same directness about Ash's body that critics called groundbreaking is what some parents and school officials have cited as a reason to pull it from library shelves. The book has been challenged or banned in 2 states and 2 districts tracked in this catalog.

The objections center on the novel's explicit discussion of intersex anatomy and the physical realities of Ash's body, including the locker-room scene that sets the plot in motion. Critics raising these challenges typically frame the material as too mature or too explicit about sex characteristics for a school library audience, sometimes grouping it with broader concerns about books that engage openly with gender identity and puberty. Because Ash's story treats his intersex status as simply a fact of who he is rather than a problem to be fixed, some challengers have also objected to the book on the grounds that it normalizes variations in sex and gender that they believe should not be presented to teenagers without reservation.