Hey, it's Empire's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. It didn't occur to me until listening to

today's interview that growing up, I didn't really have a forever by Judy Bloom, you know,

a book to help boys through puberty and early feelings of sex and love and crushes and all

that, which is something that today's book hopes to be.

It's a novel titled Ultra Violet by Aida Salazar, and it's a very empathetic and open-hearted

book about an adolescent boy going through the things adolescent boys go through.

Ida spoke with Here and Now's Deepa Fernandez, and there's a part of the interview where they

hit on how, when boys start dating girls early on.

There is this gut reaction to protect the girl, to teach the boy to not be a creep, which is all well and good and understandable, but it can leave boys wondering, well, what about us?

That's ahead.

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Middle school. It's that age where tweens turn into teens, when puberty begins, when hormones go wild.

So what's a young boy to do when he feels the first pangs of a crush,

when his body starts to change, when sex ed in 2024 is called human development?

And access to this information is everywhere, but with few filters. Well, young adult author,

Aida Salazar looked to literature to help her tween son,

and she found a huge gaping hole. So she wrote her own book, and it's billed as the Judy

Bloom for Boys. I like to think of it as the feminist Judy Bloom for Boys. Her book is called

...