A Boy Named Queen

By Sara Cassidy

Who will be brave enough to make friends with the boy named Queen? Sara Cassidy’s acclaimed novel, A Boy Named Queen, is now available in paperback!

Evelyn is both aghast and fascinated when a new boy comes to grade five and tells everyone his name is Queen. Queen wears shiny gym shorts and wants to organize a chess/environment club. His father plays weird loud music and has tattoos.

How will the class react? How will Evelyn?

Evelyn is an only child with a strict routine and an even stricter mother. And yet in her quiet way she notices things. She notices the way bullies don’t seem to faze Queen. The way he seems to live by his own rules. When it turns out that they take the same route home from school, Evelyn and Queen become friends, even if she finds Queen irritating at times. Why doesn’t he just shut up and stop attracting so much attention to himself.

Yet Queen is the most interesting person she has ever met. So when she receives a last-minute invitation to his birthday party, she knows she must somehow persuade her mother to let her go, even if Queen’s world upends everything her mother considers appropriate.

Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.4.3
Describe in depth a character, setting, or event in a story or drama, drawing on specific details in the text (e.g., a character's thoughts, words, or actions).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Groundwood Books
• Release date: Aug 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781554989065

Sara Cassidy

SARA CASSIDY is a journalist, editor and the author of twenty children’s books. Her books have won the Sheila A. Egoff Children's Literature Prize and been Junior Library Guild selections. They have been nominated for the Governor General's Literary Award in Young People's Literature, Chocolate Lily Award, Ruth and Sylvia Schwartz Children’s Book Award, Diamond Willow Award, Silver Birch Express Award and the Sunburst Award. Sara lives in Victoria, British Columbia.

Book preview

Cover: A Boy Named Queen by Sara CassidyTitle Page: A Boy Named Queen by Sara Cassidy, published by Groundwood Books, House of Anansi Press, Toronto, Berkley.

Copyright © 2016 by Sara Cassidy

Published in Canada and the USA in 2016 by Groundwood Books

Thank you to Groundwood editor Shelley Tanaka for her thorough, thoughtful attention. — SC

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Distribution of this electronic edition via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal. Please do not participate in electronic piracy of copyrighted material; purchase only authorized electronic editions. We appreciate your support of the author’s rights.

Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press

groundwoodbooks.com

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Government of Canada.

Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and Government of Canada logos

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Cassidy, Sara, author

A boy named Queen / Sara Cassidy.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-55498-905-8 (bound).—ISBN 978-1-55498-906-5 (epub).—

ISBN 978-1-55498-907-2 (kindle).

I. Title.

PS8555.A7812B69 2016          jC813’.54          C٢٠١٥-٩٠٨٤٣٧-٧

C2015-908438-5

Jacket design by Michael Solomon

Jacket art by Betsy Everitt

For Chloe, Finnerty and Sophia

1

Evelyn has forgotten how to fold up the lawn chair. Push? Pull?

Right. One hand on the back, press a knee here, yank upward and …

Ouch! Evelyn shakes her hand hard as if she can fling out the pain. She puts her throbbing finger in her mouth and sucks, gazing up.

It is a bright Tuesday. The sky is perfectly clear. No popcorn bursts, no cottony fistfuls of chair stuffing, not a single down feather. Only strange patches where the blue is so light that when Evelyn peers into them they lose color completely. They’re like windows or tunnels. Maybe to outer space!

Click-click. A sparrow scrabbles for a hold on the birdfeeder’s short peg. Two more chairs to fold.

As always on the last day of summer holidays, Evelyn and her parents have spent the morning scrubbing their brown two-bedroom house that stands in a row of other brown two-bedroom houses. They’ve coiled the hose. They’ve packaged up the badminton net with its rackets and birdies (Evelyn’s mother, who is Scottish, calls them shuttlecocks) and stowed everything tidily in the garage.

Finally, Evelyn’s mother pronounces the house neat as a new pin.

Lunch is tomato soup. Evelyn’s father breaks his crackers into his bowl so the pieces float like icebergs on a red sea. Evelyn thinks it’s rude of her father to dump his crackers in his soup, as if he’s lazy and in a hurry at the same time. It’s like when he cleans the wax

Reviews for A Boy Named Queen

[jennybeast · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

What an odd, dreamy, little book. Almost poetry in cadence and imagery, but focused in its message -- be yourself, don't worry about what other people think. Also, perhaps buying shoes a half size too small is not the best choice. I particularly loved both sets of supportive parents, though they are very different.

[reader1009-863136 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

diverse children's middlegrade fiction (5th graders, new kid in school who challenges gender roles)
The story was so short, I'm not sure it made much more than a fleeting impression on my distracted brain, but I liked thoughtful Evelyn and confident Queen (whose given name is Peter, but who asks everyone to call him Queen partly as a test to see how accepting they are), and I think this microcosm of a story works.
In the short span of the book, Queen manages to give Evelyn some of his thick skin/insult force field, though you hope that the two of them can stay safe throughout their school careers when surrounded by homophobes and xenophobes and potentially physical/mental bullies.

This is a good one for a thoughtful kids' book group: the discussion would be helpful to kids who are forming their own ideas of gender and identity and also gives a positive example of how to interact with other kids during those awkward and too-often unfriendly middle years.

[brainannex · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

A bit after-school-special for my taste with a typical straight-laced young woman and a typical manic-pixie-dream-boy young man who wears funky clothes and takes weird food for lunch. An entry for younger readers into queer fiction.