One true way

Overview

Shannon Hitchcock sets her novel in a junior high school during the 1970s, a period when the adults responsible for guiding students were often required to keep essential parts of themselves hidden. Within that atmosphere, a young girl finds herself drawn to another girl and is forced to reckon with feelings she has no framework for understanding.

Rather than offering easy resolution, the book follows its protagonist through confusion, self-doubt, and the slow work of sorting out what she actually believes about herself, apart from what she has been told to believe. The adults around her, bound by the era's unwritten rules of silence, model both the cost of concealment and the quiet courage of living authentically under constraint.

Hitchcock's approach favors restraint over melodrama, trusting younger readers to sit with ambiguity rather than handing them a tidy moral at the end.

A Story of Its Era

By anchoring the narrative firmly in the 1970s, the novel invites readers to consider how much, or how little, has changed for young people grappling with their identity in a school setting. The decade's social climate meant that teachers and coaches who were gay or lesbian risked their livelihoods by being open about their lives, and that climate of enforced secrecy shapes how every character in the book is able to act.

This historical framing lets Hitchcock explore coming-of-age themes common to middle-grade fiction, first crushes, the fear of being different, the search for belonging, while grounding them in a specific set of social pressures that gave those universal experiences an added weight. The result sits within a tradition of middle-grade books that use personal stories to illuminate larger shifts in how American schools and communities have talked, or refused to talk, about sexuality.

Why One True Way Has Been Challenged

Much of the friction around this title centers on where it belongs on a shelf: whether a story featuring a middle schooler's same-sex attraction is suitable reading for the age group it was written for, or whether it should be reserved for older readers, restricted, or removed from school libraries altogether. Beneath that placement question lies a more direct objection to the book's content.

Some readers have objected to the normalization of same-sex attraction in a book aimed at young adolescents, arguing that the subject matter is inappropriate for the age group regardless of how it is handled. Others have taken issue with the novel's depiction of teachers and coaches concealing their sexual orientation, viewing the portrayal of closeted adults in a school setting as an implicit commentary they'd rather keep out of the classroom. These concerns have led to the book being challenged in 1 state and 2 districts tracked in this catalog, reflecting a broader pattern of scrutiny directed at middle-grade fiction that treats LGBTQ identity as an ordinary part of a young person's experience rather than a topic to be avoided.