Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for giving me a free advanced copy of this book to read and review.

Sol Santana gives us an intense look at an intersex teenager’s life in Just Ash.

This is why I want to review books. These stories that need to be told, talked about, and shared with others. Thank you to Santana for writing Ash’s story.

To say that I am touched by Ash’s story is putting it mildly. I am horrified, disgusted, hurt, lost, warmed, and ultimately hopeful that there are people like Evie, Trina, Deak, and Miss Marbury everywhere.

Now that I have said all of that you might be able to guess that Just Ash can be dark at times. Yes. It directly confronts all of the horrifying events that can happen when parents are ill-prepared for an intersex child or do not want to address any of the concerns of having one. Ash’s pain could have been avoided if honest communication and healthcare had been gotten from the start.

Now in defense of Ash’s parents, I can’t believe I am coming up with a defense for them. Sometimes you don’t know what you need to know until you need to know. They may not have known that there are doctors that specialize in intersex or in the specialities within intersex. Or that steps needed to be taken to ensure that Ash can choose to remain Ash. Or the support groups that are available for Ash and his parents.

This knowledge expands to schools, doctors, and courtrooms. The only intelligent words I heard uttered by a mandatory reporter in this story was by the judge stating that he needed to consult someone else because this topic was beyond him.

As I am going over my words here for this review, I think I am coming off a little preachy and I don’t mean to. Ash’s story hurts my heart. It’s real to me. Santana makes Ash, Michelle, Evie, and the support group come to life and their reality touched me.

I think Just Ash is a must read for everyone. It illuminates so much about not only people who are intersex, but how families and communities treat people that they don’t understand. Santana illustrates this beautifully with the contrasting histories of people from Salem witch trials. I just love everything about this story…well let me rephrase. I love how it turns out. I love that I found this book. I love that Santana wrote this. I love knowing that Just Ash is out there to maybe, just maybe, be a lifeline for someone who needs it.

Thank you to netgalley for providing an e-galley for review. Just Ash by Sol Santana is a heartfelt and ultimately uplifting novel about an intersex teenager who fights to express his identity his way after his body starts menstruating during soccer practice. Just like his ancestor, Bridget Bishop, Ash is an outcast in his town of Salem. Ash's immediate family is not supportive, but does find a place to belong which gives the book it's hopeful and courageous ending.

⭐⭐⭐

I've never run across a book with a character that was intersex before, so this one really intrigued me. Unfortunately, I didn't end up enjoying it as much as I had hoped. I found it slow, and the actions of the characters confusing at times. I also loathed Ash's parents. That said, I gave this author an extra star for tackling a hard subject that I haven't seen in a fictional book before (I am sure they are out there). I also quite enjoyed the whole "Salem history" angle. So, a mixed bag with this one...

**ARC Via NetGalley**

Sometimes I request a book and then forget what drew me to it, and am surprised when Is start reading it and discover what it is about. That was the case with this book.

This is the story of an Intersexed boy who is raised male, until he gets his period, and then his mother wants him to present as female. She makes him wear dresses and go to a new school, and is even trying to get his penis and testicle removed so that he can be fully female, and not have any ambiguity.

It is one of those stories that tears at the heart stings and doesn’t let go. Very shocking and very sad, but well worth reading, if for nothing else to tell other intersexed people that they are not alone, and to have sympathy from allies

<em> Thanks to Netgalley for making this book available for an honest review. </em>

A wonderfully written coming of age story of a young intersex boy whose life gets turned upside down when he gets his first period during soccer practice.

The frustration and despair felt by Ash was palpable, I truly felt their emotions as if they were my own. It's an incredible skill to make a reader connect and empathize with a character who's primary struggle is unrelatable to them.

I do think this book could have benefitted from being longer and more fully fleshed out. The pacing was quick and it was easy to get through, but the primary conflict could have easily used another 100 pages.

2.25 Stars. I think this rating was more like a disappointment one than anything else. This book stars an intersex person who identifies as male, but his body just decides to feminize itself after he hits puberty. He's then ostracized and bullied at home and school, and his only friend, Michelle can't always help shield him from some of that pain because she has to go through some stuff as well.

The metaphors are also stretched painfully thin, though I understand where the author was coming from. The theme is not expressed very well in my opinion. Ashley is almost immediately othered once his body starts to go through puberty as a female body. He compares his plight to that of Bridget Bishop, who was a woman that was well disliked by her neighbors in Salem Village. Bridget was also one of the first women accused of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials of 1692. She was the first person to be murdered after being found guilty of witchcraft. I think Ash is right about one thing: Bishop was targeted because she was different, and the cover of the witchcraft panic during that summer gave people cover to get rid of her. Just like the misunderstanding of Trans and Intersex issues gave people the excuse to be cruel to Ash. But I do find issue with the framing, because Ash's parents are completely awful to him. They knew he was intersex, and just did a 180 spin once his body decided to go through puberty as female. The instant panic kind of works, but once they worked through some of those fears, I expected them to come around to Ash's side, but nope, they were horrible throughout the book. I can't say that it can't happen in real life, because I am sure it does, but it just doesn't quite work for the comparison between Ash and Bridget.

I think the ideas are all here, and the book just suffers badly from poor execution. It's a little scrambly at times, especially when Ash is trying to compare himself to his ancestor, though the end message is still pretty powerful. I think there are actually two themes here that kind of bump up against each other. One is that Ash's body does an unexpected thing, and he starts to feminize, so he's now automatically thought of as weird despite the fact that his body could do that. The second is that he was socially expected to do female things, as soon as his body became more outwardly female, and that he didn't want to othered him even further. So he's effectively treated as a witch - and hunted for it. It doesn't quite work, the comparison to Bridget, because it was more about her station and personality. She openly defied her community, and denied the power the men demanded they have over her. She was actually special for her time, but I don't think directly comparing teenaged Ash to an established firebrand of a woman was great.

We need more intersex rep in queer books or just books in general, and I like Ash and most of the side characters, like his sister and Michelle, but it took the pitchfork townsfolk to short a time to start actually wielding them at Ash. Ash himself, a person who strongly identifies as male, just lets himself be called female too quickly. Again, I don't know if this is like a lived experience, but he pushes back against his doctor because she basically reduces him to whether or not he'd like to reproduce, but he does not do so when his mom forces him to gender himself as female. It just feels too sudden to me. It looks like this is a polarizing book, so I believe you'll either love it or hate it - very few people were down the middle. Me? I was just disappointed.

I received this ARC in exchange for my honest review.

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Thank you to Lerner Publishing Group and NetGalley for access to this digital advanced copy.

Ashley "Ash" Bishop is a high school junior who loves soccer, has a secret crush on his best friend Michelle and is fascinated with Salem history. No one other than his parents know about his CAH (Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia) until his body starts to feminize. He is Intersex, having both male and female genitalia. His first period appears during soccer practice, staining his shorts in front of the entire team. This event leads to a series of life changing decisions which are forced on him. Ash must decide if he will stay silent or stand up for himself.

Possible Triggers: Abuse, Bullying, Homophobia

This was such a good book, and one needed in HS libraries. #OwnVoices

Conflicted. Wish there was more ownvoices intersex so definitely tried to be as open as possible but also setting, pacing, etc detracted from this book as did the randomly extreme moments that came out of nowhere.

When I stumbled across this on NetGalley I knew I wanted to read it.* That book cover has Boston (including where I actually live) on it, it's an own voices LGBTQIA story, and it happens to be released in October and set in Salem, I mean COME ON how could I NOT request it. Unfortunately, it didn't quite live up to my hopes for it. Maybe they were too high to start because the book started out strong but puttered out by the end.

Just Ash is the story of Ash who has spent their entire life as a boy who happened to have both male and female parts, but in the opening scene gets his period and a series of horrible events follow as he is forced to pretend to be a girl by his parents for some time until he finally sets his foot down.

There was so much of the story that was horrifying and frustrating, but that was Santana's point. Ash's lack of agency and society's lack of flexibility or understanding of someone who didn't fit into a neat little box. They got this point across really well and drove it home continually. Where this was most powerful, however was when Ash joined an Intersex support group after running away to his sister's in Boston. The range of experience and condition type really opened Ash's eyes to show that he wasn't alone in the world.

We were the Contemporary Witches of Salem, after all. Two outcasts unable to blend in, unable to fit the mold. The kind of people you blamed when the social order got disturbed, when the rye grew mold and rotted people's brains. I didn't need to be a historian or an anthropologist to know that three centuries wasn't long enough to change human behavior. (Chapter 10)

The love story aspect was adorable and served to reiterate Ash's maleness and male identity, but overall was a bit clunky. The way both Ash's parents and Michelle's (the love interest) parents treated them and their relationship and sending Michelle to gay conversion therapy just weighed the novel down. I get what Santana was trying to do, in reiterating that by forcing Ash to live as a female it made Michelle's parents scared she was a lesbian and it was a viscous cycle of homophobia and genderphobia and misogyny and ugh.

We all know I'm super cautious about reading books set in a city I've lived in or visited frequently, because it's so easy to be pulled out of the story by an erroneous or glaringly wrong detail. Thankfully, the author clearly knows Salem and Boston which was a relief after reading Quietus and having it rip me out of the narrative with how badly laid out the city was in their book. There was one major error in this book which did make me say WHAT?! Ostensibly, this is a contemporary story with cell phones and game developers, so at the oldest we could say late-90s, but I really imagined it to be more 2010s. So, it really stood out to me when there was passing reference to the Orange Line being above ground. I've lived in the city since 2009 and the Orange line was never above ground (centrally) in my time being here. It took me all of 5 minutes to verify that the section the author referred to was moved underground in the late 1980s, so well before this book could possibly have taken place.

'Humans are incredible,' Trina said on a sardonic exhale. 'Keep coming up with new and creative ways to hurt each other. You'd think after two hundred thousand years, they'd run out.' (Chapter 17)

In the end what really put me off about the book was how Ash dealt with one of the major crises of the novel. I saw it coming pretty early on, but gave the author the benefit of the doubt and don't get me wrong, I 100% understand he did it out of self-preservation. However, after his own experience of persecution and everything he went to in order to gain agency over his own body to do what he did and say what he say just left me with a bad taste in mouth. It just felt so underhanded and manipulative and rather than use it as an opportunity to try and build a bridge or form some sort of understanding to be so cold and calculating and threating it just hurt my soul.

Recommendation: In general I felt this was a solid read. It trailed off toward the end and didn't have as much of an impact as I hoped it might when I first stumbled across it. I wasn't happy with some of Ash's decisions, but I really feel that Santana wrote a genuine story that highlighted many issues intersex individuals face and the challenges society continues to throw in their faces from medical and social issues to love, family and friendship. I truly wish the ending were different or there were an epilogue bridging some divides as Ash got older for hope and looking to the future, but that's on me, not the author.

*I received a copy of Just Ash from the publisher via NetGalley in return for my honest opinion. No goods or money were exchanged.

I got an ARC of this book.

I really wanted to love this book. I got so excited to see an intersex character. Then when I learned that it was an ownvoices novel I was beyond excited. That is pretty much all I can really say that I liked about the book.

I never got into it. It was just so slow and disjointed. I had to forced myself to read and even then it was only a page or two at a time. I didn’t like a single character, I didn’t like the attempts at romance, I didn’t like that sexual assault was played off (how are they still friends?). I don’t like pretty much anything I read.

There was some basic plot, but it was constant interrupted about the Salem Witch Trials. If your setting takes away from the story, don’t use it. If this were a story that felt like it was telling the connected or complementary stories, then it would have been cool. Instead it really came off as the location taking over the plot over and over again.

I am sad that I didn’t like it, but it really wasn’t for me. We need more books with intersex characters and more openly intersex authors getting the spotlight.

LGBTQ and then I always add a plus. It’s merely to make it easy on myself but I shouldn’t. The I and A are as important. Just Ash is about an intersex boy and although I’ve read countless queer stories, I never read a story with an intersex MC written by an ownvoices.

Ash is a sixteen-year-old boy who suddenly gets his first period in front of the entire boys’ soccer team. Ash has male and female genitalia. Specifically: a penis and a vagina. No one knows he’s intersex except for his parents who decided at his birth he should be raised as a guy. But after getting his first period, his mom wants him to be a girl.

I loved the way non-fictional content about intersex was interwoven into the story. I always get happy when I learn from a book. It was an easy read and I flew through the pages. Ash was a likable person and I liked Michelle, Evie, and Trisha. I loved the conversation Ash and Ariel had. But …
A lot of side characters were downright disgusting, including Ash’s parents. I didn’t understand his pediatrician, a boy suddenly calling a girl? And his mom too? It felt like the opposite of transphobia, raised as a boy, than suddenly treated as a girl (against his will). WTF? And I didn’t understand Ash either. He was so sure about his gender and just let his mom turn him into a girl. I wanted to scream and shout at him. Please Google! Birth control pills contain female hormones! Maybe there are other ways to stop your periods. Don’t wear that skirt! Tell your mom you want to go to the hairdresser! But none of it all. I read these parts with disbelief and even got a bit bored because Ash let all of this happen so easily in the first part of the book. The second part of the book was better, even though it was too rushed.

I wanted to love this book so badly and give it a beautiful four or five star rating. Sadly, I couldn’t. Overall I found the characters not fleshed out enough, and too black and white, the pacing too irregular (slow parts interchanged with rushed parts), and the story laced with too much unnecessary drama.

An intersex boy resists when his parents try to force him to try "being a girl."

JUST ASH is a message to intersex teens: you are not "wrong," and you are not alone. The heartbreaking abuse the protagonist endures from his parents is softened by the love and unmitigated acceptance from his older sister, his girlfriend, his intersex support group, and a supportive teacher. But the most heart-wrenching part of the book is how much a reality experiences like these are for many LGBTQIA+ teens. In addition to the positive (and grossly underrepresented) intersex perspective, the story and characters are compelling. I would consider this novel a must-buy for all high school and public library collections.

Ash is a compelling narrator. He was born intersex and identifies as male. After his gender assignment becomes known at his school, he and the reader are taken on a journey of self-discovery. It's never in question that Ash knows who he is, but those around him are far less certain and react in some of the worst ways possible. This is a great book to share with someone who may not understand the nuances about gender assignment, identity, and presentation, but are willing/open to learning. There are some plot points that may not make sense in the moment, but they do all come together by the end.

Theres a lack of intersex stories out there, and especially own voices, so I was happy to have to opportunity to read this one. This book is very informative an allowed me to learn and understand more abvout the intersex experience, and I related to much of it as a trans person.
I did have some issue with the drama in this book. It seems it was trying to go for a realistic depiction of a trans teen, but so many awful things happened and nearly every character sucked that it made it seemed unrealistic. There was alot of trauma thrown in that it felt unrealistic, and most the adults in this book were evil caricatures with no depth.
Overall, this book was decent for a debut and I can see the author growing and getting better from here. This book kept me interested the whole way through and was a fast engaging read

An interesting book, which thoughtfully considers many of the issues that intersex youth face, although at times it did border on melodrama, which may have been due to the writing style. Ash's family is just SO awful that I did find myself wishing for a more nuanced depiction - what would it be like for Ash to grow up in a family which was ultimately well-meaning, but which, due to society's depiction and treatment of intersex people, ended up harming rather than helping him? Having a cast of almost impossibly terrible characters with little shades of grey did make the narrative seem a bit unbelievable.

That said, it's not a bad book at all, and I'm glad that it draws attention to intersex people, who are really doubly marginalised by being largely ignored by the mainstream and then treated like circus acts when their stories are depicted in the media. It doesn't sensationalise Ash's condition, which is a fairly hard trap to avoid falling into. There's been quite a few books about intersex people in recent years, but very few written by intersex authors, and I wonder if there might be an additional layer of authenticity to be found in works which are written by those with direct experience of the issues at hand. I believe that this author is intersex, which I think is probably why the treatment of Ash's condition is treated more sensitively.

Overall a good read, and I'll very happily read the author's next work.

This a powerful book about Ash, an intersex individual who has always lived as a boy, but now puberty has hit his period has arrived.

The book is hopeful and heartbreaking, as it shows us the best and the worst in the human race. I loved the main character and the story was written beautifully.
While this is a heavy subject, the episodes of the Salem history gave a brief transition so the book does not overload the reader.

I would love to see this book added to middle and high school libraries as I think it could give some sincere and well approached/written education and maybe stop some of the hate and judgements.

My praise goes to the author Sol Santana for approaching this very real issue and giving it honesty.

Thought provoking and forces the reader to look at their own views and beliefs.



Thank you to NetGalley and Lerner Publishing Group for the ARC of this book

This book broke me into tiny pieces, it was so good and so tragic at the same time! Perfect for young adult audiences, I can't wait for it to be released into the wild so I can add it to my classroom shelves!

As Ash struggles with his body changing, his parents react in the exact way I would hope to NEVER react to ANYTHING my children go through. They shame him, berate him, make decisions for him, and generally act from a place of fear. Which honestly makes no sense to me, because they'd known Ash was intersex from birth. When I say it doesn't make sense to me, I don't mean I don't think they would do that; it just means I had hoped they wouldn't.

I rooted for Ash from page one of the novel, which starts off with quite the bang! And while I know this is a work of fiction, I also know there are thousands of intersex individuals who go through these types of experiences, which breaks my heart.

Boy did this book fill me with many kinds of rage. The ways we hurt the people around us, whether it’s on purpose or unintentional, can influence every relationship we have, including the one with ourself.