I think everyone should read this book.
The market positioning of Just Happy to Be Here is odd and, in the most technical sense of the word, somewhat problematic: it has the cover of a literary novel, provocative, and while the protagonist is a teenager, that’s more an artifact of the specific story Kanakia is telling than fitting into genre conventions. It is published by a Young Adult imprint, and marketed as such, but the YA market largely fails the type of book Just Happy is. For one, it’s by a visibly desi trans woman (this age category is very thin on trans women); for another, it’s not a fun, cute, happy romcom. Instead, the protagonist Tara lives in a state where gender-affirming care for minors (which she is) is being outlawed. Her parents are immigrants terrified of drawing governmental attention that might jeopardize their wait for their green cards. Tara can’t take HRT or even puberty blockers.
This isn’t to say the book is anywhere close to misery porn: Tara, transferred to the all-girls campus Ainsley, experiences so much euphoria from getting to be around girls. She wants to be part of the fun, classics-based secret club. She wants to fall in love. And the tone of the book is incredibly engaging, even if you come to learn that its breeziness springs from Tara trying really hard to seem fine. She isn’t: her parents misgender her half the time, everything terrifies her, the teachers treat her horribly, some of the Ainsley girls secretly don’t think of her as a girl, and even her one trans friend Liam frequently fails her because their lives are so far apart (he is white and from a rich family; she is neither; at one point, he berates her for being so privileged because she ‘accepts the gender binary’). But she wants to be happy so badly. She wants a future. She tries to have good humor about everything.
It’s in her realistic flaws as a teenage trans girl suffering from considerable dysphoria, and the specific and painfully common reality of her situation, that makes this book a hard sell to the YA audience. The book’s Goodreads reviews are middling to outrageously negative, with many complaints to the tune of ‘where’s the trans joy?’ (the author anticipated this), about how Tara isn’t a perfect victim who’s never had a nasty thought. At the time of writing, there is only (as far as I can tell) a single review on the GR page by a trans woman, and it is possibly the most positive of all the reviews. The book, like its protagonist, exists in a minefield. It’s too much, it’s too sad, it’s not nice. Tara’s behavior is hyper-scrutinized both by characters within the book and by the reviewers that picked Just Happy up expecting it to be—quite frankly—vapid fare typical to the genre. They want a story that’s simple; they want escape; they don’t want this book’s ambiguity about who’s good and who’s bad. I’d even go as far as saying that the book’s writing style, resembling literary fiction far more than YA, presents some barrier to entry. For me though, the style is excellent; it’s compulsively readable and page-turning.
And ultimately, it is not a book about despair, not at all: in the end, Tara doesn’t score a perfect win—but she does get to have friends and a girlfriend, she does get to go on HRT, she becomes a bit of a trans girl celebrity. It’s a very hopeful conclusion, just not one of perfect, unvarnished triumph a lot of the genre might look for.
So I took the pills, and within a month I was happier than I’d ever been in my life. My breasts were tingling, my skin was smoother, and I’d had a crying session or two, but what I hadn’t expected was what would happen inside—the slow unknotting of something coiled up and tensed for as long as I’d known myself. I went around all day saying, “Wow, so I really am trans! Wow, it’s real. I am trans. And it’s real!” And people looked at me like, “Are you an idiot? Of course you’re trans.” But I was just so amazed. If I’d gone on this a year ago, or two, or three, I would’ve known just as quick that I really was the thing I’d always known I was: a girl.
Everyone should read this. It’s confrontational, relentless, and electric. I think it’ll make your month. And then, maybe we should all pre-order her next book, her adult debut, too.
A Bee Writes 
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