A review by koala_reader
My Brother's Name is Jessica by John Boyne

1.5

There's a lot to unpack with this book. First of all, I can't say that I loved the book, that's why I gave it a bad rating. There were a lot of problematic things going on in this book but I also have to say that I understand the message that the author was trying to give out by writing it. 

Let's start with the first thing that comes to mind, the main character, Sam. He is a thirteen year old boy living in London. He lives with his mom and dad who are politicians and also with his sister Jessica who at the beginning of the book comes out to her family as transgender (MTF). As a thirteen year old most people would think that you have a pretty good understanding of the world around you and the people living in it. By this I mean that usually you would be educated enough to know about the LGBTQ+ community or at least have heard of it. Even if that isn't the case, a thirteen year old definitely should have enough compassion to support a family member in whatever they are going through. But Sam is unfortunately nothing of the sort. As soon as Jessica comes out to her family he is extremely unsupportive, uncompassionate and in general just unthoughtful and begins to think that everything is about himself. He becomes mad and disappointed in his sister (which he has no right to be) and does nothing to support her or help her out in understanding her gender. Throughout the whole book Sam said that Jessica had in the past been a great brother to him and his role model and yet Sam couldn't just stop being selfish for once and be there for her. After Jessica comes out to him, Sam misgenders her constantly, not once calling her by her new name or even considering that she now is a girl. Both Jessica and aunt Rose corrected him multiple times saying that Jessica was now a girl and was to be referred to as "she/her" and should be called Jessica but even then, Sam didn't care. He thought that the whole world revolved around him and made everything about himself not once caring about how all this affected his sister. Instead he would blame her for the bullying he received and would constantly make her feel guilty of ruining his life. 

Apart from Sam all of the other characters in this book misgendered Jessica all the time, except for Sam's wonderful aunt Rose. The parents are a whole other story. They are both extremely "busy" with their work and pay zero attention to their children. They failed at having children completely. Not only that but both of them were the most unsupportive parents I have ever encountered. They wanted to send Jessica to a psychiatrist but not for Jessica's sake, they just wanted to "fix" her. Both of the parents only ever cared about their jobs and the risk of losing them which was the only reason that they wanted to fix Jessica in the first place, otherwise they simply wouldn't have cared.

The characters in this book were extremely unlikeable and didn't change. You would think that there would be at least some type of character development throughout the book but that only happened at the very end. And the only "character development" that occured was the parents and Sam just pretending like nothing had happened and everything was ok.

Now like I said I understand the message in the book and what the author was trying to do but I think that there are so many other ways to teach children about transgender people or just people in the LBGTQ+ community in general. Even the title is misgendering Jessica. The point of view in this book is mostly of the family and how this "affects" them. And whilst, sure, it might be important, I don't think that this should be the main focus in the book. This shouldn't be about the family at all, it's not them going through it, it's Jessica. They should simply just have to be supportive whilst she figures herself out. There are other ways of going about writing a book like this.

This book really wasn't that great.