If I Was Your Girl

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We definitely don't need another trans horror story, but I wish one of the first mainstream YA trans books by a trans author didn't play it so safe.

I understand that Russo is trying to show us how, over the course of the story, Amanda’s father has slowly started to accept the idea that he has a daughter. It’s also incredibly optimistic and definitely has the best case scenario ending but I think that works for the purpose of this book. But after only a half hour of the audiobook, I realized this was not a book written just to educate - it’s a story that stands all on its own. She just lays out a solid story about a young girl dealing with a difficult community she doesn’t quite fit in with. Amanda starts dating a football player named Grant, and she feels like she needs to be honest with him but her father urges her to focus on keeping herself safe.After a particularly vicious attack in a mall bathroom, Amanda becomes so depressed that she is at risk of suicide. But perhaps the most intriguing conflict is the one that develops between Amanda and Bee, who from the beginning looks like Amanda’s best hope for a friend who will understand her. I think at a lot of points, there was more "telling" than showing" (this is excluding the flashbacks, obviously). After reading it, he tells her that he loves her so much that nothing could change his feelings about her.

She’s the kind of person who’s really fun to be around, but there’s something about her that just seems a bit…unsteady. We are The Little Contemporary Corner, made up of Sarah and Sophie, best friend book bloggers from Manchester. For fifty years, she has trained to slay wyrms - but none have appeared since the Nameless One, and the younger generation.Early into this novel you just know it’s a matter of time before things blow up in Amanda’s face, and reading how things unfold is like watching a bomb detonate. 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. She decides to just lay low and try to keep her secrets away from Anna but doesn’t want to cause waves with the rest of the friend group. At first, it seems like she may succeed: she’s made friends with popular girls and drawn the attention of a cute football player named Grant.

She looked like she expected more information, but I had no idea what Dad had told people about his family. IF I WAS YOUR GIRL is an intense pressure cooker drama centered on the chaotic affair between two interrelated lesbian couples. 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.Both novels explore themes of gender identity, sexuality, poverty, trauma, and mental illness in Southern Appalachia, though they're lighter and way less bummer-y than that list might imply.