It was quite nice to see the strain on the friendship between Eric and Morgan due to football. Morgan’s father is a football coach and with Eric on the team, she’s always being compared and offered the chance to train again like she did when she was younger. That being said, another huge part of this book is football. It was wonderfully emotive and really struck a chord with how much someone can struggle as a teenager with gender. All the issues that Morgan felt towards her gender and her relationships tore at my heart, and i have to admit that this book made me cry a good few times. To me, this felt incredibly realistic and the writing of these struggles was incredible. She is struggling to come to terms with being transgender as she grows up, and especially struggles with telling Eric and her father. The main plot point is that Morgan wants to transition from being born male to female. As they’ve gotten older, life has taken them both in very different ways, but they both remain solid friends throughout the whole thing, which honestly is refreshing in a YA book. It follows Morgan and Eric, their parents meet at the hospital when both children were born, and they have grown up being best friends. However i didn’t know the relationship of the characters or any of the plot points. I knew the premise was two people who shared a birthday and it was split in to parts, each being a different year of their birthday. I had very little expectation going in to this book.

I had to get my hands on Birthday at some point to see how it compared, and to read something else from this wonderful own voices author.

A couple of years back (long ago when we first started the book club) we read If I Was Your Girl by Meredith Russo, and i absolutely loved it.

*The book discussed in this post was gifted from the publisher*Īs we have an LGBTQ+ Book Club, we’re always looking for more LGBTQ+ reads, especially from own voices authors.

Birthday by meredith russo