Blog Tour Review: Don’t Be A Drag by Skye Quinlan

Jenny (jenjenreviews)

Rating: 3 out of 5.

A story of healing, growing, and finding yourself

Thank you so much to TBR and Beyond Tours and Skye Quinlan for allowing me to be part of this experience and also providing me with a complimentary copy and media kit!

Book Information

Genre: Young Adult Contemporary
Publishing Date: May 28, 2024

Two rival drag kings competing for a crown might just win each other’s hearts.

When eighteen-year-old Briar Vincent’s mental health takes a turn for the worst, her parents send her to spend the summer in New York City with her older brother, Beau, also known as the drag queen Bow Regard.

Backstage at the gay bar where Beau performs, Briar just wants to be a fly on the wall, but she can’t stand by when the cute but conceited drag king Spencer Read tries to put down another up-and-coming performer. To prove to him that even a brand-new performer could knock him off his pedestal, Briar signs up for the annual drag king competition.

There’s just one flaw in her plan: Briar has never done drag before.

With the help of her brother and a few new friends, Briar becomes Edgar Allan Foe, a drag king hellbent on taking Spencer down. But unless she can learn how to shake her anxiety and perform, she doesn’t stand a chance of winning Drag King of the Year, overcoming her depression and inner demons, or avoiding falling for her enemy, who might not be so bad after all.

Content Warning: Anxiety and panic attacks, depression, suicidal thoughts and ideation, body dysmorphia, cancer (past, off-page), death due to AIDS (past, off-page), homophobia (past, off-page), intrusive thoughts, mention of queer characters’ deaths (past, off-page), suicide (past, off page), transphobia and vomiting

Book Links

About the Author

Skye Quinlan (they/them) is a queer, autistic author of YA fiction. They’re an avid reader, have an absurd amount of crystals and gemstones, and if they’re not tending to their garden, you can usually find them playing Animal Crossing. Skye lives in Ohio with their wife, two dogs, a snake, and two lizards.

Author Links:

Review (no spoilers)

If you’d like to follow along with the rest of the tour, you can find the tour schedule here.

Don’t Be a Drag is a coming-of-age story about an 18-year-old girl named Briar who, following a mental health scare, is sent to live with her brother, Beau, for the summer. As someone with anxiety who grew up in a conservative part of Texas, Briar hasn’t had the opportunity to explore queer spaces. So when she meets Beau’s abrasive (and frankly, rude) drag son, Spencer, Briar surprises herself by signing up for a drag king competition with the goal of outshining Spencer to teach him a much needed lesson.

The blurb sells this book as a rivals/enemies-to-lovers story, which is normally something that I would absolutely eat up. However, if I’m being quite honest, I had a really rough time with this. I even considered DNFing it at around the 60% point because this book actually pushes the normal boundaries of what it means to be a rival/enemy love interest. Not only is Selene (Spencer’s irl counterpart) a competitor in the drag competition that Briar enters, she’s also a pretty terrible person for a majority of the novel.

There are moments, such as when she is initially introduced, where the readers get to see the kinder, softer part of her character, but at any hint of distress, Selene immediately lashes out and unfairly attacks the people around her. Because of this, I couldn’t get myself sold on the fact that Selene was supposed to be Briar’s love interest. She seemed like such an irredeemable character that I had no interest in watching their relationship unfold. When it got to the 60% point and I hadn’t seen any real good coming from Selene, I put the book down and decided to look at reviews on Goodreads, which is what ultimately convinced me to keep going. Sure enough, the plot started to turn around a few pages after the point that I had stopped at, and the story actually ended on a really solid note, in my opinion.

Because of this boundary-pushing, Don’t Be a Drag is a book that is very unique in execution. Not only do we get an actual rival/enemy love interest (with all the upsides and downsides that that entails), we also get a coming-of-age story that follows not just one person’s character growth, but everyone else’s as well. We watch Briar come to terms with her gender expression, anxiety and depression, but we also see so much more. Selene has to learn to acknowledge her trauma and emotional baggage, Beau has to discover how to love again after having his heart broken by his first love, and many other side characters learn more about themselves within these pages.

I will say that, as a reader, I was immediately taken with both Enzo and Achilles as side characters. Should Skye Quinlan decide to write a book with Achilles as the main character, I would definitely be interested in reading it.

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