Beautiful Music for Ugly Children

by Kirstin Cronn-Mills

Overview

"This is Beautiful Music for Ugly Children, on community radio 90.3, KZUK. I’m Gabe. Welcome to my show."

My birth name is Elizabeth, but I’m a guy. Gabe. My parents think I’ve gone crazy and the rest of the world is happy to agree with them, but I know I’m right. I’ve been a boy my whole life.

When you think about it, I’m like a record. Elizabeth is my A side, the song everybody knows, and Gabe is my B side—not heard as often, but just as good.

It’s time to let my B side play.

Winner of the 2014 Stonewall Book Award for Children's and Young Adult Literature.

Praise:
“Every so often a book comes along that is so sharp, so moving, so real, and so good, you want to press it into everyone’s hands and say, Read this! READ THIS!”—Courtney Summers, author of Cracked Up to Be and This is Not a Test

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780738732510
Publisher:	North Star Editions
Publication date:	10/08/2012
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	121,604
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.80(d)
Lexile:	HL600L (what's this?)
Age Range:	12 - 17 Years

About the Author

Kirstin Cronn-Mills is the author of Minnesota Book Award finalist The Sky Always Hears Me And the Hills Don’t Mind and Beautiful Music for Ugly Children. Cronn-Mills received her doctorate degree from Iowa State University and currently teaches in North Mankato, Minnesota, where she lives with her husband and son.

Read an Excerpt

Open publication - Free publishing - More dj

Editorial Reviews

Gabe Williams has a lot going on. He’s about to graduate from high school, he’s just started hosting a radio show, and he’s got a crush on his best friend Paige. Overshadowing it all: everyone knows him as Elizabeth. Cronn-Mills, whose The Sky Always Hears Me and the Hills Don’t Mind featured a teenage girl grappling with her sexuality, has clearly done her research. Gabe’s difficulties—from dealing with freaked-out parents and bigoted classmates to navigating love, sex, and whether to use the men’s or women’s room—are well documented. So much so, in fact, that the book sometimes feels like a PSA exposing the challenges a trans teen faces. Cronn-Mills never minimizes those challenges (Gabe faces some terrifying abuse), avoiding a too-happy ending, but Gabe and Paige’s supportive friendship and Gabe’s love of music shine through. Gabe spins Elvis, Devo, and Prince on the radio, and old media meets new as his fans come together via Facebook. It’s impossible not to root for Gabe as he finds the courage to live the life he wants. Ages 12–up. Agent: Amy Tipton, Signature Literary Agency. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

As if high school is not hard enough for a loner and die-hard music geek, Gabe is a guy trapped in the body of a girl. In the spring of senior year, he has come out as a transsexual to his family and Paige, his only friend at school, where he is known as Elizabeth, or "that lesbo chick." After telling his neighbor John —a radio DJ and mentor in the radio business—Gabe plans to lie low until graduation, when he can move to the Twin Cities to begin life as a man. But his parents still call him "Elizabeth," his brother ignores him, and he blurts out his name as Gabe on his first late-night community radio show. When "Beautiful Music for Ugly Children" attracts a following at Elizabeth's school, Gabe is forced to decide whether to be Gabe to everyone or keep his true self hidden. This moving story of senior-year insecurity and bravery is told by Gabe who does not shy away from frank references to male and female genitalia, sexuality, slurs related to sexual orientation, combined with an overwhelming amount of music trivia. Reviewer: Laurie Cavanaugh

VOYA - Laurie Cavanaugh

Gr 8 Up—Elizabeth Williams knows he has always been a guy, and if he can only get through graduation in a few weeks, he can begin his new life as Gabe. He is transitioning, but his family refuses to acknowledge him, and his classmates bully him. The only person who supports him is his BFF, Paige, and, predictably, he has a crush on her but can't take a chance on ruining their friendship. Gabe is a music geek, and his ultra-cool, grandfatherly neighbor John, a former DJ, lands him a community radio show, Beautiful Music for Ugly Children. Gabe DJs as himself, and after working up the courage to tell John, who is fine with him being a "triangle," they put together a show about A sides and B sides, which becomes popular with the Ugly Children Brigade fan club and a running theme in the book. But when Gabe has a date with one of his fans, and she recognizes him as Liz, word spreads and some fans drop out of the Facebook club, while others get violent. When John is critically hurt defending Gabe at an Ugly Children event, the offenders are arrested, John's long-lost daughter shows up, Gabe's parents have a change of heart, and Paige and Gabe may have a chance together. While this transgender coming-of-age tale wraps up a bit too quickly, the quirky relationship between Gabe and John and their shared music obsession elevates this story above the average problem novel.—Betty S. Evans, Missouri State University, Springfield

School Library Journal

Readers first meet Gabe as he DJs his first community-radio show, Beautiful Music for Ugly Children. It is only after hearing Gabe's friend and neighbor John, a fellow music lover who worked as a DJ for forty years, use Gabe's birth name that readers learn that Gabe is transgender. Being trans, Gabe opines, is like being a 45 record with an A side and a B side. When the story opens, only a few people know about Gabe's B side; the rest see him as a girl. When Gabe's radio show becomes an underground hit, generating a difficult-to-believe-but-pleasing-to-imagine cadre of fans calling themselves the Ugly Children Brigade, Gabe's B side is pushed further into public view. There are dates failed and successful, a forcible outing, a heartfelt but refreshingly easy coming-out talk with John, and a pair of increasingly violent, threatening and genuinely scary enemies. While Gabe's coming-out process figures heavily into the story, it is, refreshingly, only one aspect of his experience. The show-stealer here is John, a unique, well-conceived, funny and loving figure whose enthusiasm for music and endless support for Gabe provides solidity and warmth amid the many changes Gabe experiences. A kind and satisfyingly executed portrait of a music-loving teen coming out as transgender. (Fiction. 12 & up)

Kirkus Reviews