If I Was Your Girl by Meredith Russo is a big-hearted novel about being seen for who you truly are.

Amanda Hardy is the new girl in school. Like anyone else, all she wants is to make friends and fit in. But Amanda is keeping a secret, and she's determined not to get too close to anyone.

When she meets sweet, easygoing Grant, Amanda can't help but start to let him into her life. As they spend more time together, she realizes just how much she is losing by guarding her heart. She finds herself yearning to share with Grant everything about herself, including her past.

But Amanda is terrified that once she tells him the truth, he won't be able to see past it. Because the secret that Amanda has been keeping? It's that at her old school, she used to be Andrew. Will the truth cost Amanda her new life, and her new love?

This is a universal story about feeling different and a love story that everyone will root for.

There's bad news and good news about the Cutter High School swim team.

The bad news is that they don't have a pool.
The good news is that only one of them can swim anyway.

A group of misfits brought together by T. J. Jones (the J is redundant), the Cutter All Night Mermen struggle to find their places in a school that has no place for them. T.J. is convinced that a varsity letter jacket—exclusive, revered, the symbol (as far as T.J. is concerned) of all that is screwed up at Cutter High—will also be an effective tool. He's right. He's also wrong. Still, it's always the quest that counts.

And the bus on which the Mermen travel to swim meets soon becomes the space where they gradually allow themselves to talk, to fit, to grow. Together they'll fight for dignity in a world where tragedy and comedy dance side by side, where a moment's inattention can bring lifelong heartache, and where true acceptance is the only prescription for what ails us.