"Eustacia's Secret: A Love Story" is, as its subtitle suggests, simply a story about love. Laced throughout with humor, pathos, and adventure, the book is about two sophisticated, intellectual, teen-aged boys who fall in love. The conflict arises in that one of those boys is a homophobe and the other is a transgender girl, a fact of which the homophobe, Darcy Cox, is unaware. Darcy is the only child of a professor of classics at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire; Stanford Abernathy, the transgender girl, is the only child of a linguistics professor at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica. The two professors were classmates and best friends at Dartmouth. When it becomes clear that Stanford's increasingly feminine appearance is making it impossible for him to maintain his male identity in Jamaica, where effeminate boys are vilified and bullied, his parents send him to live with the Coxes. He arrives as a girl with the name Eustacia, and the only people who know about Eustacia's transgender status are Darcy's parents, the Hanover High School superintendent, and the school nurse. When Darcy and Eustacia fall deeply in love, the elder Coxes are faced with a difficult choice between their promise to the Abernathys to keep Eustacia's secret and their wish to protect their homophobic son from the potentially disastrous consequences of his discovering that secret on his own. A sequel, "This Perfect Love," has recently been written by the author's friend Florian Verona.
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