I don’t know how to begin here, except to say that as I write I’m still happy-ugly-crying from reading this book over the course of one evening. I do think that transgender adults might have this response a lot more than the kids who this book is intended for. Fair warning.

Uncle Roderick just died, and Bug is about to start Grade Six. Bug, a slightly weird, lonesome child, loved Uncle Roderick, a gay man and drag queen who acted as an additional parent; now, in the wake of his passing, Bug is faced with the absence not only of Roderick, but of a childhood hiding in the ambiguity of vague tomboyishness. Bug’s best friend Moira (formerly known by the masculine moniker Mo) feels she and Bug need to be made over before the start of school in autumn and brings cosmetics and nail varnish around constantly to try to fix the issues she sees with both of their aesthetics. Bug hates this, but also has no other friends. There is just something about Bug that has never really clicked with other people. Sometimes Bug looks in the mirror and Bug’s face isn’t Bug’s face. But that’s just how mirrors are, right?

Then there’s the ghosts.

Bug’s house is old, and it’s always had ghosts. Bug feels them in cold spots, in ephemeral hands snatching, and in dreams that once terrified young Bug, sending them running down the hall into Uncle Roderick’s arms. Now there’s something else happening. Strange violent pranks seem to be targeting Bug, destroying small things around the house, and hurting Moira. Bug knows Uncle Roderick wouldn’t want to hurt anyone, but his presence also seems to definitely linger – strange things point to his spirit still being present, sending Bug down a rabbit hole of combing through Roderick’s things and researching ghosts desperately at the library. Bug realises that if Roderick is still around, he must be trying to tell Bug something – but what?

And why did Roderick have all those materials about gender identity in his wardrobe?

There are more books about transgender youth now than there used to be, and I appreciate the gradual recognition,  but this is the first book I’ve found that deals with haunting themes both literally and emotionally. Too Bright To See deals with the spiritual haunting from a lost family member, and also captures and appreciates the haunting hollowness of adolescent dysphoria. I loved ghost books as a kid, and I think the unearthly feeling I had in my own body was part of why. Lukoff’s real/unreal magic that is viscerally true to Bug but invisible to others works perfectly and is both chilling and undeniable. There is a beautiful scene where Bug stands in a creek and hears a strange chorus of ghost voices who shout out to him, filling his head with noise, but indecipherable – the chorus thins out until Bug hears a voice that is unmistakably Roderick, shouting, then talking, then whispering comfortingly – but whose words are not comprehensible. Lukoff pairs the pain of living with a sensation of alienation and distraction one can’t identify with one of the other major negative emotions I experience as a queer person: grief for the people who came before you (family or not) who cannot speak to you in the straightforward way you need, because they’re physically gone. The loss of our queer parent figures, our caregivers, generations of people we might have been or loved or been loved by, is overwhelming, but it’s something that kids feel too. In Lukoff’s vision, our loved ones also love us, and they sometimes scream to us when we need to hear the truth about the world we live in now. We can love them, and they know.

Bug ends up okay in this; he experiences no bullying or cruelty, though there is grief and alienation and misunderstanding and financial precarity. This is as upbeat a book as any you will find, but it’s also engaged deeply with the realities of living, and it is an honest and absolutely necessary thing to provide our children with. For me and other trans adults, it is a story to start healing our confused and lonely inner child.