There are so many good queer authors/artists in the Children's and YA graphic novels these days, and I wish some of these stories had been around when I was the age of the target audience! This one is a sweet exploration of gender roles that would have absolutely hit me the right way, growing up, and was still an excellent read as an adult.
There's nothing super mystical about witches, in Aster's world. While the public at large is not aware of magic, his family is steeped in it for generations. All the girls in Aster's family are witches, and all the boys are shapeshifters. Because this has been the case for generations, the family is well prepared and homeschools the kids to ready them for their abilities when they emerge. Aster hasn't developed his shapeshifting powers yet, though, and while his family has simply labeled him a late bloomer and assume he'll come into his own in time, he is fascinated by the schooling of the girls. Aster is pretty sure he's never going to shapeshift at all, because despite being a boy, he's pretty sure he's actually a witch.
But only girls become witches. The abilities of the boys and girls in the family is innate, genetic, and very definitively split along gender lines. He's chastised for spying on the girl's lessons, and told witchcraft is very much off limits. Of course this drives a wedge between him and his family, and you can hardly blame him for finding a friend in the world beyond their magically protected estates in the gender non-conforming Charlie.
Then the boys of the family begin to go missing, and there is evil work afoot that requires witchcraft to solve it. Aster knows he can figure out what's wrong, if his family will just forgive him for using witchcraft to do so.
This is not a super long story, so there's nothing extra here that does not serve the plot, but it's well told and a beautiful tale about breaking the norms of gender binary and how restricting that doesn't serve anybody well. I'm sure this will speak to a lot of queer people out there, and even though I wouldn't call it a transgender story it still spoke to me.
