Boy2Girl

by Terence Blacker

I don't want to fall behind while catching up, so here's one that I only just finished reading.

It's kind of awful, but I also kind of loved it. The premise is preposterous, and the writing — well, it's hard to tell because the perspective skips from character to character every few paragraphs, which I found intensely irritating and unnecessary. When I read the first 10 or so pages before bed one night, I wasn't sure I'd be able to finish it, that's how bad it seemed. But the next night, I finished the entire book in one sitting, during which I laughed out loud several times and found myself grinning a lot. And I totally swear I only had one beer.

An orphaned American boy moves to live with auntie/uncle/cousin in London; ridiculously, cousin and his friends make American boy dress as a girl for the first week of school. If you can make it past that, you'll get some funny bits. The cross-dressing boy turns out to be pretty cute as a girl, with long blond(e) hair and a small frame. He fancies himself a tough guy, so the way he gets into flipping his hair, swishing his skirt, and wearing a training bra is amusing. The funniest, though, was how this brash and tom-boyish seventh-grader captures the attention of the twelfth-grade lothario. Oh, yeah, and he inherits 2 million dollars, and his long-lost jailbird dad turns up looking to cash in, but sort of turns out to be a decent guy following the impregnation of his new former-stripper wife.

Like I said, ridiculous, but somehow I enjoyed it, the way you can sometimes enjoy a really really really dumb romantic comedy film that you get on Netflix and watch by yourself because you're too embarrassed to admit to anyone that you want to watch it.