King Bro!
by Jenny Jägerfeld; trans. from Swedish by B. J. Woodstein
Intermediate    Arctis    150 pp.
2/24    9781646900404    $16.00

Eleven-year-old Marcus lives in Stockholm, but his mom’s job as a voice actor means he’s spending the summer in Mälmo, a city in southern Sweden. At first Marcus is nervous around his tough new neighbor, Mikkel (or is he saying “Me kill”? It’s hard for Marcus to understand his dialect)—a kid covered in tattoos. But after Marcus proves himself in a skateboarding contest (and a gnarly skateboarding accident), Mikkel declares them “blood brothers.” They spend the summer together, getting “tattooed” (with pen) by Mikkel’s teenage brother, sneaking out to an amusement park in Copenhagen, and eating lunch with Marcus’s babysitter, whose very presence he resents. The only thing missing is his dad, who stayed behind in Stockholm. When Marcus came out as a trans boy, his dad didn’t take it well—and now he worries that telling Mikkel might mean losing him, too. Jägerfeld is a master of quirky character details, from Marcus’s dad’s bicycling “diaper” (really cushioned bike shorts) to his mom’s nude mime routine. Narrator Marcus’s observations are laugh-out-loud funny and sometimes wise, as he reflects on his experiences as a trans person with confidence that no one knows his identity better than him. The trans storyline covers familiar ground, but Marcus’s thoughts about his identity and the pain he feels in the face of rejection are movingly and satisfyingly portrayed.

Pubissue-From the March/April 2024 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.