This review originally posted at More Than Just Magic 
 Fan Art is the story of Jamie, a quiet, smart high school student. He's not popular but he's not unpopular. He likes band and graphic design and works on the school literary journal - Gumshoe. Oh and he's gay, hasn't told anyone at school and is in love with his best friend Marcus. 
 Though not every closeted gay teen is in love with their best friend, I thought Jamie's struggle to work up the courage to come out felt very honest. He wasn't afriad to tell Marcus because he thought Marcus might not feel the same way. He was afraid to tell Marcus because it might drive him away altogether. It's easy to say that if someone doesn't want to be your friend if you're gay they were never your friend in the first place. But it's a completely different matter when you're staring that situation in the face, knowing that two little words could change the relationships you've had for years. 
 Jamie's struggle to come out is paired nicely with the subplot of Gumshoe and Challis's graphic short story. Challis is one of Jamie's classmates and she's the opposite of him in many ways. Jamie tells the reader that she's "out, proud and in the GSA" and that's something he envies. So when she submits a gay graphic short to Gumshoe the content really speaks to Jamie and he fights to have it included in the magazine. It's rejected by the rest of the team for a variety of reasons all of which have to do with it having gay characters. For example: If it wasn't about gay characters it would have no plot (a ridiculous argument since it does have gay characters and gay people are not a literary device) and fears that their funding will be pulled. The Gumshoe situation demonstrated how difficult it can be to get diverse stories out there (not just LGBTQ stories) and the kind of resistance they can come up against. This is why it's so important to support the diverse books/media we have. 
 Because Jamie hasn't been able to tell Marcus the truth he develops an unexpected friendship with a girl from his art class, Eden. Eden is a lesbian who comes from a more conservative family. She's out but has to deal with a family that refuses to believe it and accept her for who she is. She becomes Jamie's confident and they learn a lot from one another throughout the course of the novel. We've been seeing more friendships in YA but usually male-male or female-female. It was nice to have a female-male friendship in a Young Adult novel that wasn't in any way romantic. 
 Though this is primarily Jamie's story, it is impossible to ignore Challis and Eden and their own lives and complications. I appreciated that all three are in very different places - they have various levels of confidence, different home lives, different groups of friends etc. This demonstrates that there's more than one coming out journey. No two people are going to experience it in quite the same way and that's ok. It's more than ok. That's what makes us unique - we all take different paths to figure out who we are, gay or straight. 
 Tregay's previous novel, Love and Leftovers, was told in verse and if you liked that style it sneaks into Fan Art as well. Gumshoe publishes poetry along with short stories and those poems are dispersed between chapters of Fan Art. This was a nice touch, and helped give voice to the experiences of some smaller characters. However I'm not a huge poetry reader myself so I often found those sections fell a bit flat. They are an element of the story that is going to resonate with some readers better than others. 
 Fan Art is a simple story about coming out and falling in love. I did find that everything wrapped up so neatly the end didn't feel as realistic as the rest of the book. But that didn't stop me, and shouldn't stop you, from enjoying the story. Fan Art is a charmingly thoughtful and sweet book for anyone who has been afraid to share who they are for fear of rejection but also for those fighting to find a representation of themselves in book and media.