plus, the autism was only mentioned when lukas was struggling with something, and the storyline was never really closed. we didn't get an autistic story that empowered you, that showed you how to embrace it; instead, i feel like we got another one that left us hanging, no steps forward. after all that, having multiple chapters of friendship, love, power of community, butterfly and roses was just so messed up. the whole book y'all were the worst to each other, all characters, and now suddenly it's all peace and quiet among each other? how? If the characters in May the Best Man Win showed up on your doorstep in real life, who do you think you’d get along with most? And who would honestly grate on your nerves even though you love them? May The Best Man Win follows Lukas and Jeremy, two senior boys who are both competing for the spot of homecoming king. The catch is that Lukas and Jeremy used to date before Jeremy came out. As I said, May the Best Man Win is a story that centers two angry, grieving, messy teenagers who don't know where to place their rage and their frustration when it feels like the world is taking away their control, and so they project all of that onto each other, especially when they already have a challenging history as exes. Each of them knows the other person "can take" their ugliness and their anger, so they pour all of it into this homecoming race. Is it healthy? No. Does it set a "good example"? No. But it does make sense.

Overall i wouldn't recommend this book. I had to push myself to even try and finish it in the first place. when i started reading this book, i noticed it switches from very light-hearted to very, very dark in a matter of seconds. in example, at some point there's a pretty serious conversation and then there's a comparison with a chihuahua. normally this doesn't really bother me, but with this book the balance between light/dark just felt...off.

this is honestly on the edge of problematic but: the side characters deserved so much more. they were just there as plot devices which is...quite frustrating. especially sol and naomi, the "non-binary kid" and the "asian girl", as described in the book. i personally just can't handle characters who feel like they're there for diversity points and to further the plot. to use so the main characters can become closer. just...no please. Lukas. My sweet bb Lukas. I love that kid. An angel who just wants to keep his family together. A kid who struggles with social cues and nuance and has no idea why the guy he loves dumped him out of no-where before coming out. A boy who wants to be homecoming king so he can get into an ivy school and finally fill the shoes left behind by his perfect brother. I'm a bit bias... he's definitely not perfect. He makes mistakes. He takes things too far in his competition for the crown. May the Best Man Win is a contemporary, but world-building is just as important in this setting as it would be in SFF. Can you tell us how you built out Jeremy and Lukas’s world? we don't see a lot of jeremy's emotions because he feels like he should all hide it, which is fair and realistic. but what i personally don't get is how we as readers didn't get some kind if exclusive look into his brain. i don't know; i already didn't like him and his reasoning was hard to follow if you didn't really knew how he felt... Anyway. Based off the cover and synopsis this seems like exes from enemies to possible lovers but there’s not really any romance. I don’t care if there’s romance or not necessarily but I thought that that was such a great idea. I wanted a light hearted rom-com with trans rep!! Plus, Lukas is autistic and coping with grief so there was representation there too.

Characters: The supporting cast was great (namely Sol and Naomi), but I often found it a little hard to root for the two heroes, especially Jeremy. I can't exactly say that I didn't like either of them, because at the end of the day, they're really just teens making mistakes (and hopefully learning from them), but both Jeremy (and Lukas) did some things that were a bit hard for me to reconcile with. Jeremy's character was raw and intense and just so...angry. But I also understood where that anger was coming from, and it did give him a lot of room to grow, even if I found it hard to sympathize with him sometimes. And Lukas was far from perfect too, though I did enjoy his character arc. When both boys take their rivalry too far, the dance is on the verge of being canceled. To save Homecoming, they’ll have to face the hurt they’re both hiding—and the lingering butterflies they can’t deny. In particular, I loved how Ellor tied these complex and messy feelings the characters are feeling to the queer and neurodivergent experience, respectively. In Jeremy’s case, the pure wrath that he feels comes from constantly being disrespected as a man and feeling the need to prove his masculinity through not only achieving, but prototypical ideas that link violence to it. As for Lukas, his need to prove himself comes primarily from how other people view him being autistic combined with the death of his very successful older brother whom he had a complex but mostly negative relationship with. I also very much appreciated the fact that despite how messy and sometimes problematic these characters were, there was either always a narrative admonishing and/or correction of the problematic behavior or a delicate line about subjects such as a person’s gender, sexual identity, and more that was never crossed. So there's a lot tied up for him in this competition, because he sees winning the crown as getting his classmates and the school administration to not only see him as a man, but like him as a man enough to vote for him, and to see him as a man who deserves to *win* and not merely exist. There's equally as much tied up in the homecoming race for Lukas, who is grieving the loss of his brother and wanting to prove to his family that he can secure a future for himself as a queer Autistic person, since winning Homecoming King pretty much guarantees an acceptance to an Ivy League school. Not only that, but his family is falling apart because of his brother's death, and his parents are on the verge of divorce. So he's also trying to prove that he can be a source of pride and happiness for them just like his brother was. A trans boy enters a throw-down battle for the title of Homecoming King with the boy he dumped last summer in ZR Ellor's contemporary YA debut.as most people wrote, i too will start by saying i was so excited about this book. the way it was marketed from it's summary to cute cover art, everything looked so rom-comy and just, nice? if you didn't get the memo by now, it is not even close to that. And when I say that they're truly battling it out for Homecoming King, I don't mean some light sabotage, spying, or shenanigans. I mean they are actively trying to hurt one another and hurt each other's chances, and they do things that could potentially harm themselves and other people, both physically and emotionally. There are times when they definitely cross the moral line, and it's purely because there is so much at stake for each of them. It is an ugly battle between two ruthless, unforgiving exes, and truth be told, that take-no-prisoners approach was one of the biggest draws of the story for me, because the book is not attempting to romanticize or sanctify either character, which is something we rarely see especially in queer YA fiction. Umm why are all my most anticipated reads disappointments this year? 2021 is by far the most disappointing year in terms of new releases, arcs, and just finding a good book in general. Jeremy is a really fascinating character to me, because he is so terrified and isolated, and a lot of his fear and anger stems from the fact that he's afraid no one will truly love him while seeing him for his transness. He's also grieving, in a way, because he's mourning the life he was never allowed to have until coming out and transitioning, and also the femininity and feminine spaces that he's had to give up in the process of transitioning. Above all, the story does such job of commenting on how transmasc people, specifically, are in danger of adopting toxic masculinity as a means to shield ourselves and "successfully" pass, if our goal is to pass. I think I’d get along with Lukas best—he’s (mostly) always got a calm head on his shoulders. Jeremy has too many of my worst features, and is sort of always primed to be upset—not that I can blame him for that, with the year he’s had! But Jeremy shares my habit of anxious catastrophizing about extreme events, so I don’t think we’d be good to hang out together, even though I wish him all the best! We’d drive each other up a wall.