by Richard Mercado
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Release date: July 7, 2026
Review copy provided by the publisher.
Content: There is some teenage drinking. It will be in the Teen Graphic Novel section of the bookstore.

Kevin has always felt like he’s ignored. No one (except for his two best friends) knows his name at school. His parents ignore him in favor of his (more successful) older sister. And so when his parents ignore him when he comes out to them, he decides he needs to do something different just to get noticed. Enter Raymond: the most popular kid in school, who is also gay. He decides to take Kevin under his wing, changing Kevin’s clothes and hair and catapulting him into the popular circle. But the further down this path Kevin goes, the worse he feels about everything. Can he find a way to be true to himself and get noticed?

I liked this graphic novel – it’s an age-old story, one that I think needs to be told over and over again: being your most authentic self is much better than being popular. It’s a hard lesson to learn, especially in middle and high school, and I think that this is a good book to add to the canon of this kind of story. I liked that it was set in the Philippines, and that there were class divisions as well as personal and societal expectations. It’s a good story with a good message, and one that I hope readers will find as valuable as I did.