In the young adult novel "Beating Heart Baby," Lio Min weaves the worlds of anime and music into a coming-of-age story about queer teen love.
The novel centers around two Los Angeles boys who find a sense of belonging in their high school marching band. There's Santi, the artist and new kid who is navigating a world without his internet best friend. And Suwa, the prickly prodigy who is trans and working through a tumultuous relationship with his dad.
Both Asian boys are trying to find themselves when they find each other, and it is a shared history they didn't know they had that provides the biggest, sweetest reward for readers of this lush, page-turning debut. Along the way, the novel explores issues of grief, abandonment and emotional abuse with hope and tenderness.
In the novel, which is set up as a record album, track numbers serving as chapters with an A-side and a B-side. Santi and Suwa find their places among the Sunshower marching band community, which, like the entire book, is filled with a diverse cast. There are trans, biracial and pansexual characters as well as Black female role models, like Santi's loving guardian, Aya.
Min, who uses the pronouns they and them, developed the characters and overall book as a novelization of shōnen anime — their second love, after music — but with an element of inclusivity that they felt has long been missing from the genre, which is marketed to adolescent males.
"Even fans of the shows will agree that girls are often ancillary to the story, their interiority is narrow and they're not treated as well as the boys," Min says. "I wanted to build an anime from the ground up and do it in a way that was correct to someone like me."
Beating Heart Baby
By: Lio Min.
