If I Was Your Girl

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I really liked him – I really like all of the characters – even though they didn’t always do the right thing or act the right way in the moment, they, especially Grant, knew when to say sorry, so the communication between all of these characters was really strong, and something I appreciated on a whole other level.

I shakily handed her my menu and said, “I would like a waffle and Diet Coke please, ma’am, thank you. We pulled up in front of the Sartoris Dinner Car, an actual converted railroad car on a cinder-block foundation.Kaetrin started reading romance as a teen and then took a long break, detouring into fantasy and thrillers. For all of its positive points, there were certainly parts of this book that annoyed me or threw up speedbumps as I read. Some we receive from the authors, some we receive from the publisher, and some we receive through a third party service like Net Galley.

Each brings a slightly different perspective, because, unsurprisingly, trans people are just as diverse and prone to disagreement as any other group of people. I liked how we get a lot of flashbacks from Amanda's past from the time of confusion before her realization that she's a girl, the bullying, the support of her counselor, her suicide attempt/aftermath, all combining with her present. Another thing I enjoyed was that both Amanda and Grant had their own backstories and neither was more interesting than the other. As it was marketed as an LGBT+ book, surely there should have been a more multi-faceted depiction of the B in the acronym! She would hug me and we would sit down and watch awful reality TV shows together and she would fall asleep halfway through, and then nothing would change.

Eighteen-year-old Amanda Hardy moves from Atlanta, Georgia to the small town of Lambertville to live with her dad just before starting her senior year in high school. Again, the word here is tension: both of them have a secret, and as they each dance around the other’s secret, they have to evaluate their feelings. The narrative is also very explicit about undermining stereotypes and assumptions about gender and sexuality, such as “you don’t have to be a boy to like girls,” and a girl being masculine doesn’t necessarily mean she’s attracted to girls. We want to see stories that show the struggles of those of us who are non-binary/genderqueer/genderfluid/genderfucks, those of us who are non-cis-passing, those who don’t want to “pass,” those of us who are too poor to access hormones and surgery, those of us with health conditions that make medical transition difficult or impossible, those of us who are fine with our bodies and our gender expressions as they are but not with the way people label us with their assumptions based on them, those of us who are fat, those of us who are disabled, those of us who struggle with intersecting oppressions of racism/transphobia/homophobia/ableism/etc.

Amanda makes a whole bunch of friends and even starts to fall in love, but niggling just below the surface is the reminder that she needs to be careful everything she’s worked so hard for could be taken away. After a particularly vicious attack in a mall bathroom, Amanda becomes so depressed that she is at risk of suicide.

The majority of the plot works around Amanda trying to, or wondering whether she should, tell the new people in her life that she’s trans. Over the course of the story, Amanda opens up to one friend, a move which will have some far reaching consequences for her. On the drive home Dad is hysterical and demands that Amanda leave town, he can’t protect her if she doesn’t want to protect herself. There was one part where a character proposes a theory that homophobes are just closeted gay people hating on other gay people out of insecurity and inability to accept their own secret gayness. All written content contained on this site belongs to the author, unless otherwise stated, and should not be appropriated for use by anyone without permission.