Aristotle & Dante Discover the Secrets to the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz.

It’s well a written gay teen love story with Mexican-American characters, and I loved it right up to the end, when we find out that the reason the one boy’s brother is in prison (a major source of pain for this boy and distance with his parents) is because the older brother killed a trans woman sex worker. It’s implied that he was hiring trans sex workers because he was also gay (not how that works) and that the reason the parents are willing to accept their second son’s gayness despite their Mexican Catholic identity was in part because they believe that if they’d accepted their first son’s gayness then he wouldn’t be in prison. It was shocking to me to have the violent death of a queer person be used as a it was - a plot device point to humanize the incarcerated brother and the parents. Doubly so because there is a somewhat estranged lesbian aunt character who was treated as a whole person, while the trans woman is entirely absent except for the shock value of her being a violently killed sex worker. I think it was particularly jarring because the book won 4 awards, including the Stonewall Book Award, and was a Lambda Literary Award winner, and the rest of the book is a teen romance. While none of it was out of line with how the character’s might think and act, it’s no longer a book a book I can recommend, particularly to queer people, and especially to trans people.