Too Bright to See

Bug is the protagonist of Too Bright to See. At the beginning of the story, he is 11, but he turns 12 near the end of the book. Bug is an only child. His father died in a car crash when he was a baby, and he has spent his whole life with his mother and her brother in a big house in Vermont. The house is very isolated, so Bug spends most of his time reading, playing outside, or spending time with Mo, his only friend. “Bug” is a nickname he got from his uncle Roderick when he was a toddler; nobody ever uses his legal name. 

Although Bug has been raised as a girl, he has never really felt like one. When wearing a dress, he feels like “a Bug’s head floating above a girl’s body” (96). Sometimes, when looking in the mirror, he does not quite recognize himself. As a child, he asked his family: “What goes wrong with the mirrors sometimes?” (76-77), signaling how he felt that his reflection, that of a girl, did not match his internal identity, that of a boy. Now that Bug is about to start middle school, he is feeling gendered expectations more keenly than he used to, and that he does not really know how to be a girl.