Shae, by Mesha Maren, is an intense and upsetting story, told by Shae years after the events.  It’s not formatted like a journal, but this style creates an intriguing separation between Shae making the choices and Shae recounting her actions later.

When teenage Shae meets a transfer student called Cam, she thinks she’s found someone who understands her. They connect quickly, then become more than friends, and Shae ends up pregnant in high school. Although both of them were interested in romance and experimentation, it’s really only Shae who faces consequences — she’s home sick on the couch while Cam is going to classes and playing in a band. Around this time, Cam begins to transition to female. The novel is told by Shae after Cam has transitioned, so there are confusing moments where Cam, living as a boy, is described as she. It works well as foreshadowing, both of Cam’s transition and of the older Shae writing a journal.

While Shae tries her best to be supportive of the person she loves finding happiness, she’s facing teen pregnancy while Cam enjoys the fashions of teen girls. Cam is playing music and trying on new clothes, while Shae is suffering through the isolation and sickness of a difficult pregnancy.

There’s something unpleasantly relatable in Shae’s horrible birth experiences. Many women have seen the doctor only to be told it’s just stress or that their intense pain is perfectly normal for periods/pregnancy/childbirth/menopause. I think this familiar situation helped make the rest of her experiences more readable and relatable. Her very real pain and injuries lead to painkiller prescription,  which leads to exactly what readers worry will happen to a struggling teenager in a poor town in rural West Virginia. There’s dispassionate distance to Shae’s recounting of her addiction, and what she was willing to do to her next fix. The book is told in first person, and the ending explains how she came to write this journal, but there’s still a distance in the telling, and I found myself rereading — surely she didn’t just steal her friend’s strip club tips? Did I misread that? Surely she didn’t just factually recount how she left the baby unattended for ages? It makes for a fascinating read, even if not a particularly cheerful one.

Shae is both an intriguing character study and a look at life in a poverty-stricken part of West Virginia. The systems around Shae, starting with high school and then the maternity ward, keep failing her and leaving her out. The story manages to avoid both gritty poverty-porn descriptions and an obvious redemption arc for the character we come to care about, creating a realistic feel for unfamiliar experiences.