Baby Drag Queen

by C.A. Tanaka

Overview

Transgender teen Ichiro enters a drag contest in hopes of earning enough money to live off the grid.

Ichiro is a transgender youth in his final year of high school. He has a job as a dishwasher to earn money to help support his single mother. But it's not enough. Ichiro dreams of buying a camper van for the two of them so they can escape and live off the grid and not have to worry about money anymore. A budding drag queen, he takes a second job performing drag at a local club and learns of an upcoming contest where the prize money would be enough to pay for a camper van. But nobody knows he does drag. So when some of his friends find out what he’s really doing in the evenings, Ichiro is worried about what they will think of him. Will they still accept him?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781459835344
Publisher:	Orca Book Publishers
Publication date:	04/11/2023
Series:	Orca Soundings Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	144
Lexile:	HL540L (what's this?)
File size:	528 KB
Age Range:	12 - 17 Years

About the Author

C.A. Tanaka is a trans masculine multiracial writer of Japanese, Chinese, Indonesian and Scottish descent. A graduate of The Writer’s Studio program at Simon Fraser University, they have a BFA in intermedia from Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design and, in 2017, were awarded a fully funded literary residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. C.A. is the executive director for the Storytelling with Drag Queens Foundation, a local non-profit organization with a mandate to promote diversity and inclusion in literacy for children, teens and adults. They live in Vancouver, British Columbia, on the unceded ancestral homelands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.

Editorial Reviews

2023-01-25
A determined Vancouver high school senior steps out of his comfort zone to help his mom.

Seventeen-year-old transgender boy Ichiro hates that his mom refuses to quit her job even though her boss is sexually harassing her. Despite her insistence that he focus on school, Ichiro makes a plan to solve their money problems—he’ll purchase a camper van to save on rent. Throwing himself into his job washing dishes at a cafe, Ichiro struggles in classes and misses hanging out with friends, especially cute new girl Lexie, who might lose interest if he doesn’t make a move soon. Just when Ichiro’s goal starts to feel impossible, he learns about a youth drag competition with a huge cash prize. As Ichiro pursues the contest, he grapples with stirring romantic feelings, sharing his identity with his friends, and a fraught relationship with his mother, who doesn’t accept him as her son or recognize that he is trans (this last point may confuse readers given that she calls him Ichiro, traditionally a boy’s name, throughout). Tanaka establishes concrete goals for Ichiro, but the story suffers from unbalanced pacing, highlighted by the title’s emphasis on drag: Drag performance provides a means to an end for Ichiro, but he’s in it for the money and doesn’t start learning routines until over halfway through the book. Nevertheless, this accessible debut for reluctant readers offers an ethnically diverse cast of queer characters navigating identity and emerging adulthood. Ichiro and Lexie are of Chinese and Japanese descent.

Dramatic, optimistic, and emotionally engaging. (Fiction. 13-18)

Kirkus Reviews

It's not focused on being a drag queen, but instead it’s a story showing how queer, trans, and immigrant identities intersect, and how they can impact the lives of youth...Books like Baby Drag Queen, about queer, trans, and racialized experiences written by authors from within those communities are so important for youth to be able to access in collections…Recommended.

CM Magazine

02/01/2023

Gr 9 Up—Transgender male teen Ichiro is living with his Japanese mom in Vancouver. Since Dad, a successful professional photographer, is now remarried and living in China, Mom is working constantly at restaurant jobs trying to make ends meet. Ichiro starts picking up shifts washing dishes as well, but his plan is to save enough to put a down payment on a camper van and move with Mom to Aunt Edna's land on Vancouver Island. Ichiro, already curious about feminine clothes and makeup but hiding it from his mom, decides to enter a drag contest to earn the cash he needs. With tutorials on YouTube and coaching from a drag crew he meets through working in the club's kitchen, Ichiro crushes a performance of Miley Cyrus's version of "Jolene" and comes in second, making enough prize money to move on with the camper project and look forward to going to university in Victoria, where Lexie, with whom he has been building a chaste romance, will also be going. Many characters express some blend of Asian identity, several of them also queer and/or bisexual. The book is written at a second to third grade reading level. VERDICT With contemporary themes, relatable characters, and plenty of high school drama, this title is recommended for high school libraries.

School Library Journal