Kiss Number 8

Overview

Mads has a life she isn't looking to change: church on Sundays with her family, minor-league ballgames with her dad, and easy afternoons with her best friend Cat. The neighborhood boy, Adam, has been trying to kiss her for a while, and she's been just as steadily avoiding it, without quite examining why.

That equilibrium breaks on two fronts at once. Her father is concealing something serious enough to threaten the family's stability, and Mads starts to notice a truth of her own coming into focus: her reluctance about Adam isn't shyness. It's that the person she actually wants to kiss is Cat.

Told in graphic-novel form by writer Colleen AF Venable and illustrator Ellen T. Crenshaw, the book follows Mads through both revelations at once, letting a story about first love sit right alongside one about a family renegotiating what it thought it knew about itself.

Coming of Age Through Two Kinds of Secrets

Kiss Number 8 works by braiding two coming-of-age arcs together: a teenager discovering her own sexuality and a household absorbing a hidden truth that reshapes it. Neither storyline is treated as background for the other; the tension of the closeted crush and the tension of the family's unraveling secret escalate together, so that Mads's personal reckoning and her parents' concealment comment on each other throughout.

The graphic-novel medium suits that doubling. Visual pacing lets private, unspoken feelings — a lingering glance, a moment of hesitation before a kiss that isn't the one expected — sit next to more overt family drama without one overwhelming the other. The book's inclusion on young-adult and school reading lists points to its ongoing relevance for readers navigating similar questions about identity, faith, and family loyalty at once.

Why Kiss Number 8 Has Been Challenged

Complaints brought before school boards and library committees have centered on a teenage girl's realization that she is attracted to her female best friend, arguing that the material introduces same-sex romantic content to readers some parents consider too young for it. Because the story is delivered through comic-panel artwork, some objectors have also pointed to specific illustrated scenes as more explicit or harder to skip past than the same content would be in prose. A recurring thread in these complaints ties the book's setting — a devout, church-attending family — to arguments that its portrayal of a queer coming-of-age conflicts with religious values some communities want reflected, or at least not contradicted, in school and library collections. In this catalog, the title has been the subject of challenges in 2 states and 2 districts, reflecting a broader pattern of graphic novels with LGBTQ protagonists drawing disproportionate scrutiny compared to prose books with similar themes.