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Nearly four years since I first read it, Boy2Girl is still charmingly funny and a delightful read! Really, I love this book so much, more than I thought I would when I started it back in 2010, and here I am now, falling for it all over again.
Although this may at first seem to be a light hearted story, it has some depth to it. Sam's moved from America to live in London with his deceased mother's family, bearing the burden of his past and dealing with his mother's death in his own way, namely by pushing anyone willing to show him compassion aside and being an absolute pain. He ends up attending school dressed as a girl, an initiation into his cousins Matthew's group of friends, but no one's expecting him to play the part so well. This is where the complexity starts to come in. This thirteen-year-old boy actually enjoys being a girl, but not for the reasons you may think: for most of his life, he's been carrying around the baggage his dead-beat father left on his shoulders, not completely sure what to think of himself, and I find it so sad that a child would feel more comfortable dressing as another gender, just to escape himself and his past and be completely free to be someone else. Despite the fact that he isn't one of the many narrators, this is ultimately Sam's story.
Aside from the actual drama, this book is just too funny; it's a humor you have to be attuned to and one I absolutely love. It's not necessarily the things characters say (although there is a good deal of that), but it's their internal dialogue that cracked me up more than anything and the way they sometimes contradict one another.
The ending was a tad rushed, but I really enjoyed the last line of the actual book, and I especially liked the next page where it described what most everyone was up to once the story ended, probably a few years into the future.
If there's one thing that I didn't exactly like about the book, it's the excessive amount of narrators (if I counted correctly, there are 22, which is quite ridiculous); there are so many point of views, and I believe the book could have done without many of them, but this wasn't enough for me to lower my rating.
Although this may at first seem to be a light hearted story, it has some depth to it. Sam's moved from America to live in London with his deceased mother's family, bearing the burden of his past and dealing with his mother's death in his own way, namely by pushing anyone willing to show him compassion aside and being an absolute pain. He ends up attending school dressed as a girl, an initiation into his cousins Matthew's group of friends, but no one's expecting him to play the part so well. This is where the complexity starts to come in. This thirteen-year-old boy actually enjoys being a girl, but not for the reasons you may think: for most of his life, he's been carrying around the baggage his dead-beat father left on his shoulders, not completely sure what to think of himself, and I find it so sad that a child would feel more comfortable dressing as another gender, just to escape himself and his past and be completely free to be someone else. Despite the fact that he isn't one of the many narrators, this is ultimately Sam's story.
Aside from the actual drama, this book is just too funny; it's a humor you have to be attuned to and one I absolutely love. It's not necessarily the things characters say (although there is a good deal of that), but it's their internal dialogue that cracked me up more than anything and the way they sometimes contradict one another.
The ending was a tad rushed, but I really enjoyed the last line of the actual book, and I especially liked the next page where it described what most everyone was up to once the story ended, probably a few years into the future.
If there's one thing that I didn't exactly like about the book, it's the excessive amount of narrators (if I counted correctly, there are 22, which is quite ridiculous); there are so many point of views, and I believe the book could have done without many of them, but this wasn't enough for me to lower my rating.