A review by goosemixtapes
Freakboy by Kristin Elizabeth Clark

3.0

What if sometimes you feel like
you're pretending to be male but
you don't want to feel like
you're pretending to be female?

this book is not, as we say, "very good." but it IS a book that was important to me when i was fourteen and trapped in Gender Questioning Hell. so i'm glad it exists, and i hope it's offered that same little lifeline to other trans kids out there. that said, i'm also glad there are other trans YA books, not because this one is evil but because it's clumsy.

quick synopsis: this is a novel in verse about a high schooler named brendan, who is to the outside world a cishet guy and a wrestler, though he gets a lot of flack in the sport and at school for being unmasculine (which. honestly he isn't.). he's begun to feel increasingly uncomfortable in his body and yearns to transform into a girl; he's also terrified by this. our other two POV characters are vanessa, brendan's girlfriend who also wrestles, and angel, the trans woman brendan meets who helps him out on his questioning journey. also a quick personal synopsis: i read this reaching desperately for a lifeline when i was fourteen and terrified that i was trans, and i sort of imprinted on it and i've read it three times. so no one is more disappointed than i am to say that it's just kind of... eh.

(note: brendan uses that name throughout the book; pronouns aren't discussed at the end. i'm using he for him here because... that's what the book does.)

let me start with the poetry: it's not great. granted, i haven't got a lot of experience with the form, but i don't know why this book had to be in verse. there are some segments where it really works, especially to mimic the chaotic repetition of brendan's thoughts! but most of the time it's just regular fairly-bland YA writing, except

split up
like
t h i s

the other major problem with this book is that the supporting characters are weak. i love angel, i'm fond of her, but she's got about two major traits and they're "latina" and "trans woman." there's a dichotomy going on here where brendan is the neutral, stereotypical american teen--white, upper-middle-class, has a girlfriend, plays sports, thinks being trans would make him an "american degenerate"--and angel is the outsider, a mexican trans woman who has experienced sex work, abuse, assault during sex work, and disownment by her biological family. it verges on transgender pixie dream girl: angel, as someone from outside brendan's white-picket-fence bubble, is his branch to the world of marginalization. this could be done well, but it's really not in this case, considering that every single angel line is about being trans. i mean, i talk about being trans a lot, but goddamn, give her a hobby or something? (or at least quit the exaggerated latina-stereotype speech style; it makes me wince coming from a white middle-aged author.)

vanessa i do not love and am not fond of. in fact, i hate her pretty fervently. i get it: this book came out in 2013 (holy shit, it's been a decade!) and the cis world needed a cis POV character whose hand they could hold. but her POV is so wildly uninteresting compared to the other two, because it revolves near entirely around her relationship anxieties. there's something interesting gender-wise going on under the text here, because vanessa, while cis, is her school's only female wrestler, and thus feels pressured to act hyperfeminine off the mat because of familial messaging that she has to keep her boyfriend interested somehow. there's a lot there! like the fact that being gender-nonconforming =/= being trans, or the fact that brendan and vanessa are both punished socially for diverging from their assigned gender's roles, even though vanessa is cis. but this book skims over all of that in a few pages. vanessa's storyline is shallow, and it creates a weird situation where every POV switch is like:

ANGEL: so here's that time i got kicked out of my house and physically assaulted for being trans
BRENDAN: being in my own body digusts me i am desperate to look like a woman i can't live like this but i also can't tell the truth because no one will ever love me
VANESSA: omg what if brendan is cheating on me :(

also i just can't stand her. sorry for being a mean transsexual, but here's her response to

Spoiler

brendan telling her he might be trans somehow. note that this has CLEARLY been tearing him up for weeks, to the point where vanessa was afraid he might be seriously depressed.

You know that feeling of falling
you sometimes get
when you're asleep?
Your whole body limp, heavy,
and you're tumbling off
a cliff and there's a thud
that makes you open your eyes?

Hearing your boyfriend
tell you he wants to be a girl
is the same sensation,
with no thud at the bottom to wake you up.

okay, she's in shock, i get that. she could be nicer about it, but this isn't AWFUL, it's just--

Then I'm madder than I've ever been.

Was he only pretending
to love me?

Was breakfast
in bed a lie?

Was sex with me
just a sick experiment?

...

If he knocks
on my window
tomorrow morning

I'm pushing him
out of the tree.

okay! fuck you, lmfao! as if it's a personal betrayal! again, i get it, cis people feel this way, but on top of the lack of substance to the rest of her plotline, all i could think was, "fucking shut up, bring me back to brendan and angel."

so why, then, did this book get me so bad when i was fourteen? well, because the portrayal of dysphoria and questioning really rang true to me then, and it still does. the terrified guilty yearning, the torment of wondering, the desperately searching google for answers, the watching people of the other gender wishing you had what they had, the dreams, the daydreams, the sheer relief of just getting a piece of clothing that makes your silhouette look right--here this book feels genuine.

now, i don't love the conclusion of this particular arc:

Spoiler

brendan tells angel that he doesn't hate being a guy, like, all the time, and she says, "oh, maybe you're gender fluid," and a lightbulb appears over his head and it's magically all fixed--okay, i'm being facetious, but even at fourteen this part felt like a letdown, because for me simply having the labels wasn't enough. i knew every gender label on tumblr in 2016, man, but that didn't mean i could self-apply. still, i can't say this is a blanket bad thing, because for some people, hearing the right label IS enough to make it instantly click. so i guess my other quibble here is that i'm not sure brendan's genderfluidity is built up enough, because to be frank, to me, he reads as a trans girl who's scared of being a trans girl. sure, maybe being a man isn't torture every day, and sure, maybe he doesn't want to wear high heels, but plenty of trans women don't want to wear high heels, and "this isn't torture" =/= "this is an identity i want to keep." that said, clark notes in the back of the book that a lot of brendan's journey was inspired by her genderfluid daughter, who supervised the drafting of the book, and i don't want to say that her daughter is wrong or reductive about identity labels. i just would have loved to see more exploration of genderfluidity as a concept, i guess.

and yet i'm still giving this book three stars, instead of fewer, because i can't really bear to give it worse when i found it at exactly the moment i needed it. plus it's very readable; the pro of the unremarkable verse is that it goes down fast. i wouldn't pick this as your first trans book, or even your second or third, and oh wow 2013 really was ten years ago and it shows. that said--i still appreciate this one, man, no matter how much i (and trans YA) have grown up since.