Review: Ana on the Edge

Ana on the Edge by A.J. Sass
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Finished on June 19, 2021

Favorite Scene/Quote: "That's not a foreign language. They're gender-neutral pronouns."

I was recently able to get my hands on this book and I was so eager to read it that it passed many books on my TBR list. I was so excited to get it and it lived up to my hopes. I’m going to be using they/them pronouns for Ana.
    
Ana just became the US Juvenile figure skating champion for girls. They love figure skating and is very excited when they’re told that they are going to be going to a new rink and will be getting a famous choreographer. Things aren’t as nice as they had hoped and they find themselves uncomfortable when they have to wear a dress and perform a princess dance. A mistake when grabbing a name tag and Hayden, a transgender boy who is new to the rink, thinks that Ana is a boy named A. Ana doesn’t correct him and decides to lean into it because it’s new and they like it.

Ana isn’t a perfect character but that doesn’t mean they’re a horrible character. They’re selfish at times while they’re trying to figure out who they are. It means that Ana ignores one friend and lies to another, but you get why Ana is behaving the way that they do. Hayden is a very sweet character and I loved him. Tamar was also a really nice character until she hit the point where she was tired of what was going on. Faith also had a lot of potential and became one of my favorite characters. I genuinely liked all these characters and would love to read more about any of them.

One of the things that really got me was how Ana perceived their identity. It was described by Sass as Ana finding comfort, or discomfort, by how people perceive them. By the end of the book Ana knows that they are nonbinary, but still doesn’t have everything figured out. They know that they don’t want to be seen as Princess Aurora, but they aren’t sure what pronouns they prefer or whether they’re going to want to stick with skating in girls’ competitions.

There is so much that I love about this book. I loved Ana growing more uncomfortable as people call them the wrong name or say the wrong things. I love that Ana was a young teenager and acted like it. They were scared to come out and couldn’t figure out how to put their feelings into words. I just love it. Ana and Faith slowly becoming more comfortable with each other and bonding.

This book is excellent! It has a great story of someone learning that there are more options than they knew about and exploring their identity. It’s not clear-cut, and the characters aren’t perfect, but it’s honest and touching.