Felix Ever After is the book equivalent of Regigigas

 

Today I’m talking about Felix Ever After by Kacen Callendar. I’ve had this book on my shelf for a good amount of time. It’s one of those where I have no idea when or where I got it, but I’ve always sort of just had it.

The blurb says that Felix Love has never been in love – and. Yes, he’s painfully aware of the irony. He desperately wants to know what it’s like and why it seems so easy for everyone but him to find someone. What’s worse is that, even though he is proud of his identity, Felix also secretly fears that he’s one marginalisation too many – Black, queer, and transgender – to ever get his own happily ever after. When an anonymous student begins sending him transphobic messages – after publicly posting Felix’s deadname alongside images of him before he transitioned – Felix comes up with a plan for revenge. What he didn’t count on: his catfish scenario landing him in a quasi-love triangle… But as he navigates his complicated feelings, Felix begins a journey of questioning and self-discovery that helps redefine his most important relationship: how he feels about himself.

In the first chapter, we follow Felix and his bestie, Ezra, to this fashion shoot in Manhattan. And I’ll just say something, similar to what I said in my My Fair Brady post, it kills me when people mention specific things about stuff I know nothing about. In that post it was theatre, and in this one it’s New York City. The author of this book was just mentioning places in New York and where Felix was travelling to and I was fully just like what the hell, sure, because they could have been lying, and it wouldn’t have made any difference to me. Anyway, in this first chapter, they besties pull up to this fashion shoot they’re doing over a summer programme and then get into an argument with the director, Declan, because Felix hates him, and then Felix storms off after the director is all but actively transphobic to him. A little bit later, Felix and Ezra go to their programme again, and someone has managed to get into Felix’s archived posts on Instagram and managed to get a bunch on personal information and photos from pre-transition, outing their deadname. They don’t out Felix as trans as he mentions he doesn’t try and hide any of it. But just the sheer idea of even doing something so horrible as taking a trans person’s old pre-transition content, including deadname, and just slapping it around is absolutely insane to me. Why would anyone ever even think of doing that?

Now I do feel bad for admitting this, but I considered dropping this book when I started reading it. I haven’t DNF’d a book since I was in university and physically couldn’t stand reading some of the books that were on my reading lists. But there was something about the opening of this book that just didn’t grip me. It wasn’t specifically until 90 pages in, chapter seven, where I thought to myself, “Okay, here we go!” Having read onwards, the best way I can describe my feelings towards the book is that it looks like the flowers in the cover. Flowers that keep their buds closed until they get out into the sun and then suddenly bloom. This book definitely took a while for it to actually hook me. The actual specific event that got me was when the book started having Felix and Declan properly interact with each other, and I mean that more than in the sense of how they did in the first 90 pages where they just straight up hate each other. Full tea, in those first pages, I did not care for either of them. Like, I could empathise with Felix for the position he was in, but I didn’t like him, because he was simply acting like a dick. It was the case of I wanted to tell both Felix and Declan to get out of their own arses.

Reading this book to me felt like watching one of those classic coming-of-age teen movies. You know, something like Perks of a Wallflower. I know that’s also a book, but it’s also a movie, that I think I might have actually watched. It was just the case of, you know how you’ll read something, and it’ll have this certain feeling to it like you could see it on screen. I could see this book on screen. I know I’ve mentioned this for other books that I’ve read, and while some feel like series, others feel like movies. This definitely had a movie feel to it.

Like I mentioned above, I fully was not particularly a fan of Felix for those first pages, and that is entirely down to how I’m seeing him act. You see him act in the way that other characters in the book, the ones who don’t know him all that well, see him. It was when I got to learn more about who he was, and his journey with his gender that really got to me. I’ll fully attest to the fact that even though I love to read, it’s rare for me to have an actual full-on reaction to something in a book, but I did in this. It comes at a point where Felix is questioning his identity. He knows that he’s trans, and that he’s not a girl, but at the same time he feels like while there are times he’s a man, there are also times when he’s not. And there was a passage where he’s talking to himself about it that made me physically stop after I read it and, I think, for the first time in my reading life, I fully just took a photo of the passage on my phone. It’s a book I’ve read recently, I don’t remember which one, where I mentioned there was a character that had an experience eerily similar to one of mine, and this was another one of these bits. Like, I read the words and was like, “Oh, that’s exactly what is going on in my brain.”

I did also really appreciate that, while I’ve mentioned this book feels like a movie to me, it still gave time to so many of the side characters. Felix’s best friend was Ezra, so he was there through just about everything, but there are other characters, Leah, Declan, and Marisol, to name a few, and every single one of them all had a section in the book. Each of them had some kind of arc throughout the book with how they related to Felix. To give quick examples, Leah and Felix slowly become friends throughout the book after just sort of floating around the same social circle. Marisol and Felix used to date, so the book covers the aftermath of what happened between the two of them. Declan and Felix end up messaging each other from Felix’s private Instagram account and their relationship changes. Everyone gets their time in the sun.

This book was definitely gaggy – for me, at least. When I was struggling in the first section of the book, I did pop over to Goodreads to just take a look at the stars this book had got, and it had like a 4.2 or 4.3. I took that to mean that it must be good. For me, it was definitely after those first 90 pages where it got going and only got better. I’m so glad that I stuck with it. It was so worth it.

Okay, bye!