Green Glass Ghosts

Gr 9 Up–In 2000 at the age of 19, the unnamed genderqueer protagonist arrives in Vancouver to start a new life after an abusive childhood. Spoon shows how this newly post–high school teen becomes an alcoholic and how drinking, and a cluster of mostly careless and often inebriated peers, bring them close to the brink of death. Unlike Go Ask Alice, this is not presented as a cautionary tale but rather as an authentic experience, capturing both the dramatic and truly monotonous parts of binge drinking. While the main character ignores behavioral characteristics that should be warnings, they share compelling details of how they handled the stresses of parental rejection and their first attempts to seek acceptance somewhere else. Spoon never uses gendered personal pronouns for anyone in a cast that includes a dozen LGBTQIA+ youth and a few parents, none of whose ethnicities are stated. Hall’s occasional illustrations throughout are evocative, if inessential. This is a book that requires reading in full in order to realize its positive potency.