“When We Ride”: Rex Ogle’s Fierce, Tender Memoir-Novel of Revolution, Queerness, and the Courage to Be Seen

Revolution Begins in the Chest: When We Ride and the Uprising Within

Before anything else, When We Ride is a pulse—steady, electric, relentless. It begins in the ribcage and spreads outward, like the moment before you scream, before you kiss, before you run. Rex Ogle captures this sensation—the ache of being young, queer, angry, and alive—with such raw clarity that you feel the tension in your own body. This is a novel that moves like protest: chaotic, beautiful, and impossible to ignore.

Set against the backdrop of civil unrest and personal awakening, the story unfolds with the rhythm of a manifesto scrawled in the margins of a school notebook. Ogle’s writing isn’t clean or polished—and it shouldn’t be. The voice is jagged, urgent, brimming with a mix of confusion and conviction. You’re not reading someone’s story from a safe distance; you’re living inside their reckoning. “I thought riding would carry me away from everything,” the narrator admits. “But maybe it was meant to carry me into myself.”

The characters are not romanticized. They’re flawed, fierce, messy in the way only teenagers with something to prove can be. They love with abandon, they fight with desperation, they screw up and try again. And within this swirl of protest signs, street confrontations, and whispered midnight truths, the heart of the story pulses: a queer teen learning that visibility is not just bravery—it’s survival.

Ogle’s structure allows the story to build with the rhythm of a chant—moments of breathless action broken by stillness, reflection, and sudden, stabbing truths. The city feels alive, like it’s watching. Like it knows that every choice these teens make matters not just for their own lives, but for the kind of world they want to inhabit. The novel flirts with hope, but never lets you forget how easily hope can be weaponized or silenced.

There’s deep grief here too—the kind that doesn’t resolve. Loss, betrayal, fear, the gnawing knowledge that even those closest to you might not understand who you are. But When We Ride is also a love letter: to chosen family, to the joy of resistance, to that moment when you find someone else’s hand beside yours in the dark.

Who Should Read This

When We Ride is for readers who want their YA fiction with teeth and truth. If you found resonance in Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, The Hate U Give, or Last Night at the Telegraph Club, you’ll feel at home here—in a place that doesn’t offer easy answers, but dares to ask real questions. It’s perfect for teens navigating identity and injustice, and for adults who remember what it was to burn for change. Read it, pass it on, start something.