Ten year old Paige gave me hope in humanity and I can’t thank Tom Ryan enough for that!! For me she represented a generation that grew up with LGBTQ+ rights and accepts everyone who’s under the rainbow and I really hope that one day we’ll actually get there. For her it was so normal to have a brother who’s gay and gosh how I want more people like that in the world. Well, none except of Paige! Mark’s ten years old little sister is such a ray of sunshine and I swear she was the best character in the entire book! I loved how she saw the world and tried to understand it and I absolutely adored her stance on being queer. 😉 Speaking of the characters themselves I can’t say that I connected with any of them. Mark is gay, Talia is a lesbian or pan (she’s questioning her sexual orientation because she dated Erin who is non-binary) and of course there are a lot of other queer characters as well. It felt like I was there along with them and made new friends while we walked the streets of Toronto.Īnother thing I truly appreciated was the diversity we got to see in this book. The feeling of being a part of all those people, of the respect, acceptance, support and safety they offer. From there on out I really enjoyed their journey though and I think Tom Ryan did a great job at capturing the spirit of Pride. It’s only about the 50% mark that things actually start to get interesting when they finally hit the road. The beginning of this book was pretty slow and about half of the book deals with their stay at the family cottage. Truth be told, this isn’t as easy to answer as some might think.

This said, the most important question is: Did “When You Get the Chance” live up to my expectations or not? If you ask me the world needs more covers like that and I’d be happy to buy them all. I just love how queer this is and the skyline of Toronto in the background as well as the blurb only added to my already high expectations. This book has been on my radar for quite a while and the moment I saw the cover I really wanted to read this. *A huge thank you to NetGalley and “Perseus Books, Running Press” for providing a free ARC*

When you get the chance tom ryan