If I Was Your Girl by Meredith Russo is the story of a transgirl written by a transwoman, and they even used a beautiful trans model for the book cover. The setting is high school, and any reader will recognize the familiar trappings—divorced parents who don’t see eye to eye, teens who are or are not included in “the popular kids,” feeling scared and uncertain of social situations. There are also several flashback scenes that give the reader a fuller sense of who the main character is, developing and enriching our reader experience at a pace that is masterfully parsed. The writing here is just so honest and so real. A lot of people say that reading the Diary of Anne Frank made them feel Jewish. This book will make you feel trans, in the best, most empathetic ways. Simply stated this book is vitally important and should be required high school reading nationwide. I don’t want to spoil anything so I’m afraid to say much more so let this suffice: I adore this book. If you read one book this year, make it this one.
Reading Challenges
Here we go for reading challenge updates:
- PopSugar 2017 reading challenge No. 42 a bestseller from 2016.
- Book Dragon’s Lair Audiobook challenge Nope.
- Book Dragon’s Lair Pages Read challenge These 288 pgs bring me to 11,156 pgs.
- Read It Again, Sam Nope.
- My Reader’s Block Mount To Be Read (TBR) and Rock My TBR challenge The cover is absolutely captivating and I’ve been meaning to read this book since I first saw it. I ended up checking it out as an ebook from the library—but then I bought it, too. Heh.
- Diverse Reads challenge (here and here). Yes! This is really more of the mini-challenge from last month (gender) but it’s definitely a diversity book. I’m going to be a month or two off for the August theme of non-western because the series I just picked up doesn’t feature the promised Eastern setting til book three.
- The Book Date Full House challenge Nope. I’m down to “food” (on cover or in title) and Aussie/NZ author, so I’ll likely have to select books specifically to satisfy these requirements.
- The Book Date Read the Books You Buy challenge Yep! At first I tried to be good and just read it through the library but when it was due to expire and disappear off my Kindle app I couldn’t bear to let it go so I bought it.
- The Worm Hole’s What’s In A Name challenge Nope.
- Anne Read Along Nope.
Hashtags for the challenges that had them:
#popsugarreadingchallenge
#rockmytbr
#diversereads2017
#whatsinaname2017
#AnneReadAlong2017
Love,
Jobe
J. Jobe 