If I Was Your Girl

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I liked this book a lot because of the sweet romance and, to a certain degree, I was more or less OK with the ambiguity of the relationship.

She looked like she expected more information, but I had no idea what Dad had told people about his family.Over the course of the story, Amanda opens up to one friend, a move which will have some far reaching consequences for her.

MEREDITH RUSSO lives in Brooklyn with her cat Shadow and probably more books than is responsible for a New York apartment. When those girls pull over next to the overheating Amanda and essentially bundle her into their car, the cynical reader is expecting something Mean Girls-esque to go down. I’ve also read Some Assembly Required by Arin Andrews and Rethinking Normal by Katie Rain Hill, which are a pair of memoirs by two trans teens who were formerly in a relationship with each other.

My voice sounded like nothing—flat, toneless, with the faintest deepening that made me never want to speak again. A girl named Amanda moves to a new town to live with her dad and meets this gorgeous guy named Grant. This review contains minor spoilers regarding some characterization but nothing about the end of the book itself.

If I Was Your Girl is a simple YA story about a young girl who moves to a new school and faces all the traditional perils of high school. That’s she worthy and beautiful and the most important thing is that she’s living life as her authentic self. I know when we kissed I felt warm all over, like when you sit too close to a campfire, and I know no girl’s made me feel that way before. It’s really nice to have a story like this for trans girls — one that’s realistic about transphobia in the flashbacks but also not ten fucking hours of torture porn. At least Grant, for what it is worth, is a refreshing break from the kinds of boys we often get as love interests.As she gets to know and trust the new people in her life, the more Amanda wonders about whether or not she wants to tell them she's a transsexual, but her father continually warns her to be careful. Pushing aside her concerns she has Grant over to her dad’s house while he’s gone but of course he comes home early and catches them. Then she has an awkward encounter with Parker, the boy from the beginning of the book that liked Amanda initially and is the reason that Grant went to talk with her in the first place. I fell in love with her immediately, because all she wanted to do was be herself, even though people around her were trying to paint her as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl or The Girl Next Door or Little Miss Perfect. It comes with all the pain and worry of hiding your past from everyone around you, whilst trying to be comfortable in your new life.

Amanda is such an incredible character, and I loved everything about her; her strength, her bravery, her acceptance and love of herself. It’s a humanizing thing to acknowledge, and builds the foundation for empathy between people with different experiences and identities.Amanda’s dad didn’t cope very well with having a son like Andrew, who liked to wear girl’s clothes, who didn’t like sport and who seemed to him to have a label on his forehead saying “bully and attack me”. You can feel the emotion in the readers voice like she's actively living it and the story… just fits. Please not that I have read a proof of If I Was Your Girl, so this quote may not have made it to the finished copy.