May the Best Man Win: Zr Ellor

Product Information

if you read all of that i applaud you, and i really do hope i made some points here. i can sadly NOT recommend this book in any way. stay safe, y'all! Please please please please please let me find a best friend as perfect as her! Naomi was just so clueless as to how much Jeremy was using her and when she finally found out and realized I was so freaking happy! Although we don't see that much of her in this book I can tell she's an amazing person with good morals. The staff of Cresswell Academy are great examples of ‘performative allyship’ and how that has looked in my own experiences. They’re willing to make easy changes to accommodate trans students, such as accepting Jeremy’s name change and using his correct pronouns, but they refuse to do the hard work of changing the school to make it a truly safe space. Ultimately, their allyship is more about them than the people they’re trying to help, which not only exposes Jeremy and Lukas to harm but weakens their ability to trust others. I would love to speak on a panel about reinventing high school stories. May The Best Man Win explores a lot of traditional teenage tropes—Homecoming, bullying, a cheerleader dating a football player—but with a queer twist. You Should See Me In A Crown by Leah Johnson and Only Mostly Devastated by Sophie Gonsalez also insightfully explore and update many of the tropes, and it would be so cool to talk about the choices they made in taking apart and rebuilding these narratives for modern teens. Don’t let the cover deceive you, this book is not a cute, lighthearted romance. It’s messy and can be brutal at times, but some of the representation was so important in this book that I feel people should give this one a shot if it sounds interesting. I’m very torn on how to rate this book because I have a love hate relationship with it, but my star rating reflects how much I genuinely enjoyed it.

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... Today we’re pleased to welcome ZR Ellor to the WNDB blog to discuss his YA novel May the Best Man Win, out May 18, 2021!

I would love to talk more about why I chose to write such flawed narrators for this book! Truth be told, I think trans communities can sometimes be more places of conflict than places of healing—the trauma of living in a transphobic society is very real, and unfortunately, we tend to lash out at one another when we’re hurt because of something unrelated. To me, Jeremy’s bad behavior is a direct result of the situation he’s in as a trans teen, a situation he’s unable to navigate perfectly no matter what he tries. And I wish people would focus less on the flaws of a single character and more on the systems that drive them to act as they do.

This book was mostly based off my own high school experiences! I did enjoy talking about those experiences with my editorial team and hearing about their own high school adventures during the creative process! One reason I wanted to do dual narrators in this book was to show how nothing happens in a vacuum. Jeremy and Lukas are both influenced by each other, in ways they don’t always understand but become clear to them and the reader over time. They’re also influenced by their school and their families, neither of which are quite as supportive as they need. Oftentimes, when we or a person we care about is acting out, there’s something wider in their world at play. By showing what drives Lukas and Jeremy to act as they do, I hope readers will learn to look beyond the surface when a friend is struggling. 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. Beyond the central tension of the book, May the Best Man Win is also about self-love, expressing who we are, and our relationships with our community and chosen families. How did you weave those aspects into the story and why did you choose to explore them?Jeremy and Lukas go to a school that says it supports them, but they’re often left to figure things out on their own. Why did you want to touch on this issue in their story?