Author Birdie Schae
Publisher Knopf Books for Young Readers
Pub Date May 12, 2026
Quick Take
Smash or Pass is a warm, funny, and sharply observed sapphic YA debut about a high-masking autistic girl who goes to beach volleyball camp hoping to win back her ex-boyfriend and comes home having found something far more valuable: herself. Birdie Schae writes Ellie’s unmasking with a specificity and tenderness that is genuinely rare in YA fiction, and the slow-burn romance that builds alongside it earns every ounce of the swooning readers will inevitably do. A big-hearted story that knows exactly what it wants to say and says it beautifully.
About the Author
Birdie Schae grew up in a small town in Belgium and now studies Language and Culture in the Netherlands. She is a debut novelist, and Smash or Pass is her first published work of fiction. Schae has spoken publicly about her love of analyzing fiction and her investment in writing love stories that feel emotionally honest, and both impulses are clearly visible on the page.
What makes Smash or Pass a notable debut is not just that it is accomplished, though it is, but that it arrives with a level of specificity in its representation that many authors take several books to develop. Schae is writing about neurodivergent and queer experience from the inside, and it shows in every chapter. School Library Journal gave it a starred review, calling it a bighearted, deeply tender coming-out story. Booklist, also in a starred review, praised its gorgeous reflections on neurodivergent and queer existence. For a debut novel, that kind of critical reception is a genuine signal.
What Is Smash or Pass About?
Ellie is sixteen, autistic, and has spent most of her high school life following a careful set of self-imposed rules: date the right guy, say the right things, act the right way. Masking has cost her, but it has also kept her safe, and she tells herself the trade-off is worth it. Then her boyfriend Daniel breaks up with her right before they were supposed to attend beach volleyball camp together, and Ellie’s system collapses. Labeled boring and weird overnight, she decides to go to Camp SMASH anyway, determined to win Daniel back and rescue her reputation.
What she finds instead is Sierra, a standoffish volleyball legacy with her own complicated history, a ragtag group of campers who become something like family, and the slow, disorienting discovery that the version of herself she has been performing for years is not the same as the person she actually is. Smash or Pass is ostensibly a summer romance, but what it is really about is what happens when the rules you built to protect yourself stop working, and you have to figure out who you are without them.
Masking, Unmasking, and What Queer YA Usually Gets Wrong
Ellie is a high-masking autistic girl, which means she has spent years learning to suppress and hide her neurodivergent traits in order to pass as neurotypical. This is not a new concept in fiction, but Schae’s treatment of it is something special. She does not use Ellie’s autism as a quirk that makes her endearing, or as an obstacle that love will eventually smooth over. She uses it as the structural lens through which the entire story operates.
The seven rules Ellie lives by are not just habits. They are a survival strategy built on years of learning that her natural way of moving through the world invites ridicule and rejection. The rules have earned her a best friend and a boyfriend and a stable social position, and when they fail her, the grief Ellie feels is not just about Daniel. It is the grief of realizing that the self you constructed to be accepted was never really yours.
What makes this queer, and not just neurodivergent, is that the unmasking Ellie undergoes at camp is inseparable from her dawning awareness of her feelings for Sierra. The process of learning to take up space as an autistic person is the same process by which she comes to understand her own sexuality. Schae refuses to separate these two threads, which is exactly right. For many queer people, especially those who are also neurodivergent, coming out is not a discrete event. It is part of a larger, longer process of becoming legible to yourself.
The Slow Burn Is Doing Real Work
The romance between Ellie and Sierra is patient to the point of almost painful. Readers who prefer their sapphic romances to move at speed should know that upfront. But the slowness is not withholding for its own sake. It is the story being honest about where Ellie is.
Ellie begins the book with her feelings for Sierra framed as confusion and irritation, which is entirely consistent with a teenager who has never considered that she might be attracted to girls. The gradual shift from competitive friction to something warmer is handled with care, and crucially, Ellie’s developing feelings for Sierra are always filtered through her growing sense of herself rather than treated as a revelation that arrives from outside. Sierra does not make Ellie queer. Sierra gives Ellie permission to stop hiding what was always there.
The found family element of Camp SMASH does genuine supporting work here. The ragtag group of campers Ellie falls in with provide a contrast to the social performance she has been running at school: people who like her strangeness instead of tolerating it, who make room for her instead of asking her to shrink. By the time the romance properly lands, the reader has watched Ellie build the conditions under which she can actually receive it.
Is Smash or Pass Worth Reading?
Without hesitation, yes. This is exactly the kind of YA queer fiction that should exist: warm and funny and emotionally precise, with a protagonist who will stay with you. For queer readers, neurodivergent readers, and anyone who spent their teenage years performing a version of themselves they didn’t quite recognize, Ellie’s story will feel close to home in the best possible way.
The one caveat: Smash or Pass is squarely YA, and the stakes and tone reflect that. Readers looking for the angst and complexity of adult queer fiction may find it lighter than they want. But there is nothing lightweight about what Schae is actually doing here. The craft is real, and the emotional intelligence is the kind that tends to hit hardest when you least expect it.
Final Verdict
Smash or Pass is a debut that announces Birdie Schae as a genuinely distinctive voice in queer YA fiction. It earns its slow burn, treats its neurodivergent protagonist with the specificity and dignity she deserves, and understands something important: that coming out and unmasking are often the same journey. Read it, and then give it to every queer teenager you know.
