If I Was Your Girl by Meredith Russo
My rating: 3/5 cats
“It’s easy to act like my past never happened, but it feels like I’ve put up this wall around my heart that stops me from being really close with him.”
“You know walls are there for a reason though, right?… They keep things safe and they keep things from falling apart.”
reviewing this book in terms of whether it is “good” or “not good” is almost irrelevant, because it’s one of those books that needs to exist for reasons that transcend a reader’s enjoyment of it.
take the first x-ray machine – was it perfect outta the gate? no, but it was the best of its kind at the time and we needed it and it came in handy and it saved some lives. the fact that a big-five publisher put out a young adult novel about a trans girl’s entrée into the dangers and opportunities of high school romance, written by a trans woman and featuring a trans model on its cover would be enough reason to celebrate even had the book been terrible, which it wasn’t.
it’s a very fast read, with a strong narrative voice and a clear story. overall it’s a little breathy and reference-laden for my tastes – the rushed tone of a first-time novelist who’s excited to share her story and maybe not confident enough to let it take its time to unfold naturally, but it’s honest and emotionally authoritative, although the author tries to back off a bit from the double-edged “authenticity” label in her afterwords. (yes, plural – one for her trans readers and one for everybody else (the boo-hiss sibilance of the cis-prefix makes my skin crawl, sorry))
i appreciate her honesty in these postscripts, where she explains her decision to make some aspects of amanda’s journey a little easier than it would realistically have been – not her emotional journey, but its financial and medical realities, which are glossed-over in favor of the more important and resonant emotional situations. this isn’t about self-discovery or process, it’s about what comes next. this is a love story. it’s a coming-of-age story and a family (re)birth story and the fact that it exists at all is a step in the right direction towards making some teenagers less likely to be assholes and other teenagers less lonely, because it’s a fucking hard path to be on.
russo does a good job covering the various angles – parents who are supportive or at least want to be supportive but fear so much for their child’s safety, knowing how much of the world is made of assholes, the social clumsiness of people who mean well but don’t always know what’s appropriate, the weight of the constant and casual sexual assessment of men, and the fear of misplaced trust. which i think is the best part of this book and the reason it was smart to not get bogged down in the medical or physical components – this is a really fast-paced book, where the pacing allows the details to blur as the reader is carried along. although there are obviously many elements specific to the trans experience, there’s also so much that’s universal here – this could be any YA romance-with-a-secret – any girl worried a boy won’t like her anymore when he finds out her past:
I buried my face in his neck and breathed him in again. I thought about what he had said, that I could tell him anything, and I knew that he was right – or at least he thought he was. But until the moment he learned the truth, I couldn’t know how he would feel, and that was a risk I wasn’t ready to take.
as simple and straightforward as that is, it’s the elegant simplicity that cements it into truth: you can trust anyone until you can’t, and it’s so hard to know where those lines are drawn, when a miscalculation can have consequences beyond some harmless gossip.
so yeah, it’s an important book, and it’s such a fast read that it’s generally easy to overlook the first novel-jitters, although it needs to be said that View Spoiler ».
3 stars cats for me, since i’m not really into YA romance novels, but a million stars cats for all the ways in which this book is going to matter to the right reader.
