snugglekitty

ETA: I changed the date on this because I had screwed up the coding on it yesterday and you couldn't read most of it. Here is the full review in all its glory.

Today, I finished the book Parrotfish by Ellen Whittlinger, recommended to me by

srl. I like YA books. I like books about queer issues. So I was fairly sure that I wouldn't hate this exploration of the coming out of an FTM high school student. To that extent, I was right.

What I didn't anticipate is loving this book. The main character is believable (an amazon.com reviewer said that the narrative voice was "too feminine for someone who thought they'd been a boy all their life", which made me wonder 1] what, exactly, a feminine narrative voice sounds like and 2] if we'd both read the same book), his friends and family are both real and funny, his experience of high school is the muddled terrifying confusion I remember all too well. I love the sequence of events with his love interest Kita. The teenage self-absorption that Grady and his peers experience is portrayed very realistically. When you're thinking about yourself 95% of the time, other people's revealed experiences become shocking and often quite funny. I'd forgotten that about being a teenager.

In addition to all of this, there is interesting stuff about high school social dynamics, tacky Christmas decorations, passing as a guy, the mysterious world of guy friendship, and, of course, the gender-changing parrotfish. In fact, the author managed to portray Christmas in a way that I found humorous and not wrath-inducing, and that is a feat in itself. The book would have been worth it just for that. There's also an excellent bibliography and resource list at the back of the book. Five stars.

People who should read this book: transfolk, those who like transfolk, those with trans children, those who work with children and teens, those who like YA, those who feel out of place in the Christmas world. A great offering.

"Mrs. Unger...looked up at me. She squinted her eyes. 'Don't tell me.'
Her gaze took in the haircut, the shirt, the pants.
'Good Lord,' she said. 'You're transgendered, aren't you?'" p 49

"Every time the swimming teacher had said 'Boys line up here, girls over there,' I'd had to think consciously about which line I should stand in. I'd wanted to play soccer on the boys' team when I was nine, but I wasn't allowed to, so I stopped playing altogether...I didn't want fancy white ankle socks and Mary Janes. I wanted to wear crew socks and sneakers like Charlie did. Because I knew that that was the kind of person I was: a crew-socks-wearing person, not an ankle-socks-wearing person. And maybe if people didn't divide everybody up into just two groups -- male and female, two lines only -- I could have just been a crew-socks-wearing person who played on the boys' soccer team and it would have been okay. I wouldn't have had to make a big deal out of being a boy, which seemed to be the part that was making a lot of people crazy." p 105-106

"What if," he began, staring off into the distance, "you put the most macho guy you could think of -- say, Sylvester Stallone or somebody like that -- on one end of a football field, and the most feminine woman you could think of -- say Paris Hilton or... Jennifer Lopez -- on the other end... there would be a lot of people in the middle of the field, you know? Not everybody would be standing next to Sly or Paris." p 128