May the Best Man Win (but my brain won't think up a clever title)

Hello, and welcome to today’s episode of me talking about a book that’s been sat on my wish list for ages. The book in question is May the Best Man Win by ZR Ellor. Like, I’ll fully use the Amazon recommendations as my way of browsing books, and then I’ll add them to a wish list until I eventually buy them from somewhere. And that’s what happened with this book.

Firstly, this book doesn’t mention it, but there are acts of transphobia in this book. Nothing physical, it’s all in words, but I just wanted to mention it now, in case that’s something that might put someone off a book.

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Our good old Blurbianca Del Rio says that Jeremy Harkiss, cheer captain and student body president, won’t let his coming out as a transgender boy ruin his senior year. Instead of bowing out to the bigots and outdated administration, Jeremy decides to make some noise. And his way of doing that is to challenge his all-star ex-boyfriend, Lukas Rivers, for title of homecoming king. Lukas is trying to find order in his life after his older brother’s funeral and the loss of his long-term girlfriend – who turned out to be a boy. So, that immediately gave me rivals to lovers, especially since the end of the blurb does mention they both have lingering butterflies.

Anyway, right on page three, Jeremy mentions, in an internal monologue, that he’s only been on testosterone for three weeks, and that it has made his voice into a slide whistle packed with gravel. Which, I mean, is already great when you’re already at an age where, presumably, you’re getting hit with voice cracks from puberty as it is. But to double that up with the voice deepening from being on T… The struggle, Mama. But by the end of chapter one, Lukas runs into Jeremy in the hall with a bunch of craft supplies, and the chapter finishes by saying, “We’re better off as rivals than as a pair.” And that immediately had me like, “Okay, if you say so.”

Then the next chapter starts, and it switches to Lukas’ POV, and when he’s on a bus ride to a football game, he mentions that his parents barely talk, and that he wasn’t the kid they expected to succeed and given that the blurb did mention the dead older brother, I assumed that the older brother was the academically gifted one of the two. A few pages later, he mentions to the reader that he has a form of autism, and that Jeremy was the only one that never called him weird about it, so throughout the book, there are little winks and nods to bits about their relationship and how the two of them just sort of got each other.

Now, even with Jeremy being one of the main characters, that doesn’t exclude him from still being a high school student, and a teenager. There were moments when he was thinking about some of the other students in the school and he brands them as losers, and I was sort of like, “Well damn, Jeremy, you’re not exactly a paragon of popularity from what I’m seeing.” But it was nice to see that our main characters weren’t this beacon of perfection. It was nice that Jeremy was a bit of an arse.

Lukas, at one point, calls Jeremy, or mentions Jeremy, to be something akin to a slow car crash. Not in like a derogatory way, but in like a, everything is happening right now, way. And when I said Jeremy was a bit of an arse. There’s this moment where Jeremy hurts his best friend Naomi, and then Naomi ends up asking Lukas out. And that was where I was like, “Oh god, I’m watching the car crash happening. The car crash is the entire book.” As a separate point, but also one that kind of relates to this, we’re told that, obviously Jeremy and Lukas broke up, but as the story goes on, we find out what happened from Jeremy’s perspective. So, we know why he acted the way that he did. A lot of what happens is down to the fact that the characters are teens, so they’re making the mistakes you would expect a teenager to make, even with being transgender thrown in there. It’s the kind of thing that, as the reader, I could see how to fix everything, I knew the answer, but since I’m reading it, I had to watch the characters figure it out.

But the thing was, because both Jeremy and Lukas were running for homecoming king, they were obviously rivals, and there were points where they kept doing things to basically hurt each other, because they both wanted to win. Now, on one hand, I understood, because again, they’re teenagers, and they are going to see this as the most important thing in the world. But they kept doing things to each other without thinking of the consequences, and it was so frustrating, and I kind of wanted to clip them both up the side of the head and tell them to stop. What was worse was that there were things that each of them did that didn’t just affect the other, it caught other people they knew in the crossfire, and they knew this, but did them anyway. And to reiterate the frustrating point, it was watching a catastrophe that you knew was coming being built.

Now, the toxic masculinity, Mary. I understand that this book is purposefully shining a light on how stupid and destructive it is. But fuck me… Reading this book was like Toxic Masculinity: The Movie. Mess, Mama. There’s one moment where Jeremy and Lukas are arguing, and Lukas fully thinks to himself, “[M]y good nature wears thin.” And I was thinking to myself, “What good nature?” Because, as a minor spoiler, he literally starts dating Jeremy’s best friend, Naomi, knowing full well it would hurt Jeremy. Then during that argument where he thinks he’s good natured, he ends up throwing Jeremy’s keys into a field. That’s not very good nature-core of you. Like, both Jeremy and Lukas are kind of shitty.

However, there is this bit a few chapters later where he (Lukas) thinks to himself about how hard he’s trying to give everyone what it is they want from him, and that sucked. There’s this Korean series I’ve watched, Light on Me, and in this series there’s a character, Da On, and his whole gig is that he never says no to anyone, because he doesn’t like hurting people, and he thinks, “What’s good is good.” But in that inability to say no, he runs himself so thin that he ends up hurting the people closest to him and ends up not really knowing who he is. And this thought process that Lukas has just reminded me of that, because when I watched Da On in the series, it made me sad for him.

With all the teen mess, I think that made the struggles that Jeremy was facing with his transition all the more raw and intense. Because not only is he dealing with this break-up and his transition, he’s also just dealing with being a teenager at the same time, so he’s got a lot going on, bless him. Same for Lukas really. He’s got the whole teenager thing, his parents assuming he’s the flop of their family and always trying to be the best. I could appreciate that the characters in this book were complex, and even if I didn’t always like them or what they were doing, at least they had layers to them and were interesting.

Then the inevitable train wreck happens, but because it was one that you saw coming, it was kind of sad – for the characters, I mean. Because you could, again, see it coming, and I knew what they could have done to avoid everything, but they didn’t avoid it. And it was kind of predictable, I can’t lie. I do want to mention, however, that just because it was predictable, I’m not counting that specifically as a negative. I, personally, have no problem with something being predictable. Did I see the ending of this book coming from the beginning? Yes. But, to me, there’s comfort in predictability, so I was okay with it.

And for my final point before I conclude, I’m going to put this quote, from page 371. “The DJ has started the evening with Kesha, which isn’t a bad choice, but maybe not how I want things to go.” What I’d like to say to this is that I will not accept Kesha slander. While it does say it’s not a bad choice, it’s always appropriate to listen to Kesha. The gal has got range, and if you can’t see it, that’s your fault.

Anyway, this book was fine. Where I think it excelled was talking about the trans experience honestly. Like, even though both Jeremy and Lukas had their issues, I found Jeremy far more, and I don’t know how to word this without it sounding mean but, interesting. Like, there’s a quote from page six I want to include here. “What cis people don’t get is that it’s not the wrong clothes, name or pronoun. It’s the strangling feeling… like you don’t exist. If people don’t see me as a boy, they don’t see me at all.” It was things like that. Parts of the world that only Jeremy could show us.

But I think, thanks to my utopian brain, I would have, by personal preference alone, enjoyed the book more had we gotten to see more positivity. But, again, that is down to me and my brain alone. I don’t know. Again, this book was fine. I didn’t dislike it, but I can’t really say I’ll be rushing back to it or was that wowed by it.

Okay, bye!