Because crying is for girls right? And he is a MANLY fourteen year old. The book ends with the line 'It was no time for girl stuff' after the protagonist (? maybe, it's so hard to tell with over 20 POVs throughout the book) chokes back his tears. I guess that simply by law of averages one of them had to be OK' and 'You know, for a broad you can be pretty smart sometimes' As long as it's 'smart for a girl' right? Some more fun parts of the book are when a (male) character says 'If you ever need any evidence about how pathetic girls can be, there it is' in reference to girls following fashion trends, a (male) character tells Sam his fake nails are 'slutty' (as if they sleep around?), a (male) character (referring to his wife!!!) says both 'Like all women, Ottoleen gets these crazy ideas in her head. They seem more like caricatures of real people written by someone who didn't really like them than real people. Almost none of the characters have depth, and seem to exist only to perpetuate stereotypes. We have a bully who, even from his own POV, is slow and stupid, and a hotshot who (in his own POV!!!) thinks he's so cool he refers to himself in third person, but is ultimately empty headed ('I groped in my mind for a killer comeback but, unusually, there was nothing there'). At another point our crossdresser, Sam, (upon being referred to as a 'little lady') says 'We don't talk about little ladies 's what we call sexism.' This leads me to believe Terence Blacker does not actually know what sexism is.Įven from their own POV's the girls are shallow and gossipy. The same character later complains about how women HAVE to share their thoughts with each other as soon as or even before a thought comes into their heads, and says 'If I were a sexist (which, thank goodness, I'm not) I might say this makes them more superficial than us.' Good thing SAYING you're not a sexist MAKES you not a sexist. When a character refers to a group of girls as 'chicks' another character tells him not to be sexist, despite the entire book reducing characters (male and female) to one dimensional stereotypes for their given gender. Reading it, it feels like an effort to engage topics of gender made by somebody who doesn't know what they're talking about. Maybe my expectations were a bit high, but this book was nothing but disappointing. I went in to this book thinking it was going to engage all kinds of important issues with gender, which was exciting, especially in a book aimed towards a younger audience.

Boy2girl by terence blacker