Ollie In Between

Written by Jess Callans

Narrated by Vico Ortiz

As endearing as it is humorous, this debut middle grade novel by Jess Callans is a tender, queer coming of age story about the courage it takes to find your own voice and choosing to just be. 

 

Puberty, AKA the ultimate biological predator, is driving a wedge between soon-to-be 13 year old Ollie Thompson and their lifelong friends. Too much of a girl for their neighborhood hockey team, but not girly enough for their boy-crazed BFF, Ollie doesn’t know where they fit. And their usual ability to camouflage? Woefully disrupted.

 

When a school project asks them to write an essay on what it means to be a woman (if anyone’s got an answer, that’d be great), and one of their new friends is the target of bullying, Ollie is caught between the safety of fleeing from their own differences or confronting the risks of fighting to take their own path forward.

 

"Debut author Callans’ confiding tone leans into Ollie’s flummoxed first-person ruminations with rhetorical questions that probe moments of deep vulnerability and hope. … Clear echoes of Judy Blume couple with themes of social adaptation that rely a bit heavily on analogies to the animal kingdom, but a range of readers should relate to Ollie’s sense of otherness. As Ollie puts it, 'Being yourself can hurt,' but awkward and self-aware stories like Ollie’s can help more tweens 'just be.'"—Booklist, starred review

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 8, 2025
• ISBN: 9798894869629

Reviews for Ollie In Between

[jennybeast · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Lots of great stuff in this book -- not least the undiagnosed autism rep. It's cool to see how Ollie navigates the world at the beginning of the book and, yes, how they blossom over the course of it. I loved the queer kids pack and how they lift each other up. I loved seeing Ollie get support for panic attacks. I loved the half-Iranian family -- or rather, how Ollie and Lila make their own version of this without their mom or a connection to larger heritage. I was a little frustrated because the dad is so absent, but they seem to get a lot of care and love when he is present. I loved how Ollie's project kept illustrating that no one really has the answers about what it is to be a grownup, let alone how to inhabit a gender. Lots of exploration, thoughtfulness. It's a less internal book than Melissa, but still has that contemplative seeking of self. Strong work, slow unfolding.

[bibliovermis · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I love Ollie so much. They are so, so extremely relatable, and not just for nonbinary folks—for almost every human being, the period around puberty and its seemingly unavoidable changes to one's physicality and social life is, at best, tumultuous, if not outright chaos. This is a really excellent, funny, just extremely charming middle grade/young adult novel about being yourself, even if that means nonconformity with other people's ideas of who you should become.