In the Key of Dale is pitch perfect. I fell in love with Dale Cardigan, and I couldn't stop turning the pages. Full of complex characters and relationships, this is a debut novel with great heart. Read it! -Bill Konigsberg, award-winning author of The Music of What Happens
Dale Cardigan is an unforgettable teenager who is unapologetically true to himself. I want to adopt Dale as my fictional nephew and invite him and his friend Rusty over for dinner. Benjamin Lefebvre writes about grief, sexuality, and family with wit and wordplay. Dale is going through all the awful, wonderful, huge feelings that come with being alive, and reading In the Key of Dale, I went through all those emotions with him. Lefebvre has written a moving celebration of teenage friendship, sex, and creative life. -Susie Taylor, author of Even Weirder Than Before
Lefebvre delivers a fresh, poignant, and deeply intimate narrative for the modern reader. Dale Cardigan may be a teenager, but his search for meaning in love and music is a reminder to all of us that finding your own melody is magic.
-Vanessa Brown, author of The Forest City Killer: A Serial Killer, a Cold-Case Sleuth, and a Search for Justice
In the Key of Dale is an ode to queer teens - and artists! - who boldly found ways to stay true to themselves while also coping in places that weren't always supportive. Told with humour and compassion, Benjamin Lefebvre's epistolary grief narrative will have readers both laughing and crying - sometimes at the same time. -Melanie J. Fishbane, author of Maud: A Novel Inspired by the Life of L.M. Montgomery
By turns snarkily funny and wrenchingly poignant, Benjamin Lefebvre's debut novel is a pitch-perfect paean to the geeks, loners and musical prodigies you knew - or were - in high school. As a geek/loner/former music 'prodigy' myself, I can tell you that In the Key of Dale contains not a single false note. A revelatory delight from beginning to end. -C.E. Gatchalian, author of Double Melancholy: Art, Beauty, and the Making of a Brown Queer Man
Benjamin Lefebvre's debut YA novel offers all the pleasures of a breezy, gay, will-they-won't-they high school romance while also tackling weightier themes. The result is a portrait that is surprisingly fresh yet will resonate strongly with readers' own experiences of navigating the fraught world of adults before attaining the benefits of adult autonomy ... Complex, thoughtful, and compelling: In the Key of Dale is sure to strike a chord. -Quill and Quire
Lefebvre writes about grief, sexuality, and family with great success ... Highly recommended. -CM: Canadian Review of Materials
