A review by alexacj
Like a Boy But Not a Boy: Navigating Life, Mental Health, and Parenthood Outside the Gender Binary by andrea bennett

3.0

Probably actually a 3.5 for me, but I have mixed feelings on this one so I'm rounding down. The essays written by the author were good, though I didn't entirely agree that the one about assault allegations in the academic/lit community fit in very well with the rest of them. (It was a great essay on its own, though.) No, unfortunately what put me off here were the interspersed chapters that told the stories of various other queer & trans Canadians whom the author had interviewed. It wasn't the subject matter so much as the quality of the writing; most of them read like they'd been written in the first person by people with no writing experience whatsoever, and then hastily changed into third person afterward. Monotonous, repetitive, and without much shape or pacing. If the author was attempting to preserve the interviewees' stories in their own words, well... I do understand, but in my own opinion the end result was not... good. I think those sections needed more editing than they got.

So as a whole? This book did not feel cohesive. Individually I quite enjoyed most of the essays, but it seemed like perhaps half of them fit together well and then the rest were sprinkled in to finish out the book. Worth reading, I think. Albeit with many caveats.