Ana on the Edge
by: A. J. Sass
October 20, 2020 Little Brown and Company
380 pages
review by E. Broderick
One of the things I love about middle grade books is that they allow kids to go new places, experience new things, and meet new people even if their family cannot afford travel or after school activities. In Ana On The Edge by A.J. Sass, we meet Ana, a young lady engaged in an activity I never dreamed of as a kid – competitive figure skating – and who is discovering for herself that she may not be a boy or a girl.
Interestingly enough, Ana has the same reason I do for not figure skating – her family doesn’t have the money to pay the exorbitant expenses associated with the sport. However, Ana learned to skate during a less expensive skate school, along with her wealthier best friend, and she showed such exceptional talent that her coaches and her single mother have found a way to make it work. She’s acutely conscious of the cost her training represents to her mother, and cannot afford all the extras her peers can, but she is never resentful and it does not hold her back. It was refreshing to read a book in which a kid does not have the financial resources of everyone else around them and is still joyful. As a kid who sometimes did feel resentful (though my situation was not nearly to the level of Ana’s) I would have really enjoyed reading that.
In Ana’s world – the world of figure skating – the delineation between boy and girl is stark. Her choreographer requires her to wear a skirt which she finds very uncomfortable, she skates as an intermediate “lady”, and her new program involves pretending to be a princess. All of this gives her a stark amount of discomfort for reasons she cannot explain. Plus, the choreographer and the costume cost thousands of dollars that Ana knows cannot be so easily replaced.
When Ana meets a boy at skate school, and overhears that he used to use girl pronouns, she is intrigued but also confused as to why this means so much to her. Then, when he mistakes her for a boy she doesn’t correct him. This still doesn’t make her feel “right,” and not only because she’s nervous about lying to a friend. Neither boy nor girl feels correct to Ana and it is only much later that she discovers what nonbinary means and that it might apply to her (she still uses she/her pronouns at the end of the book with most people, which is why I use them here).
There’s a large amount of panic right now that exposure to a queer child might lead other children to “turn queer.” Yet in Ana on the Edge, we can see that Ana’s dysphoria – her feelings of wrongness in a skirt or when performing her princess program – predate her exposure to any transgender individuals. Instead, meeting a trans child simply helps her find the words the express what she is feeling internally so that the adults in her life can help her sort through what it means. I think that is closer to actual real life experience.
At end of the book, Ana is still sorting things out – what to call her bat mitzvah, what division she wants to skate in, what pronouns she will use – and that too is reflective of life. Not everything comes easily for everyone, nor can it be expected to come all at once. As the author so poignantly states in the afterword, there’s no one right way to be nonbinary and Ana is still finding hers. Hopefully she gives some kids the words to express what is going on inside themselves, or a better frame of reference to understand their friends.