“This is Beautiful Music for Ugly Children on community radio 90.3, KZUK. I’m Gabe. Welcome to my show.”

Gabe is a senior at his local high school; he doesn’t have many friends, but that’s fine with him. Gabe lives with his mother, father, and younger brother Pete. He DJs at a local community radio station, and he looks forward to graduation with great restlessness.

His show starts to bring him great popularity, but the thing is …
Nobody who listens to his show knows who he is.
Gabe is actually a teenage boy tapped in a “girls” body. Nobody knows that Gabe is really Elizabeth.
Everyone at school only knows Elizabeth; and they all refer to her as “It.” They don’t know who Gabe is. All they know is that she cross dresses and tries to act like a guy.
But they don’t know his secret. They don’t know that the male they listen to on their favorite radio show is really the girl they bully everyday at school.
As his radio show grows bigger and bigger in popularity, Gabe gains confidence in who he is, and starts to express who he truly feels that he is. He starts to go by Gabe more often, But as this happens it gets found out that Gabe is really Liz. He later gets outed to his followers…things start to fall apart for Gabe… and he starts to question who he is inside.
I saw the theme of this book being people not being accepted because are different. Gabe is worried about showing people who he really is for fear of being verbally and physically bullied and even when he is being Liz, he gets verbally harassed by those at his school, by being called It, being told he’s weird and doesn’t belong there, to get away from others because he’s gross, and worse.
In this book there is a struggle that people have all over the world, and that is sexuality, but there is also bullying present. Actually, it’s that Gabe gets bullied for his sexuality. All over the world people struggle with identifying under the gender that they are born into. And so there are such things as transgender and gender fluid, which means that the individual gets to choose to identify under the gender that they truly believe they are. Bullying is also a problem all around the world. Kids everyday face harassment when they go to school just because they are different. The book made me realize how much words truly hurt someone and what people go through when they aren’t accepted for who they are.
I loved Beautiful Music for Ugly Children, and would easily recommend it. The book grabs your attention right at the beginning, and holds onto it so well that even when the book is done, you want to continue reading. As I read the last sentence of the book, I desperately wanted there to be a sequel to Gabe’s story.  This book takes your emotions on a roller coaster the whole time. Just as you think everything's going well, it takes a wild turn.