If I Was Your Girl

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p299-300) Amanda probably wouldn't have had completed her transition by 18 in real life, but I still feel it's important to have this story. Because the author is a trans woman herself, she is able to depict with nuance and realism the detailed physical and emotional experience of Amanda’s transition. Grant gets hit on and Amanda finds out that Grant’s friends participate in some “locker room talk” about her and whether or not Grant is going to get laid.

But I think it’s important to show that kind of vulnerability and confusion because not everyone’s going to understand or handle the situation in the same way.

As I stared out at the swiftly moving trees, my mind was in a mall bathroom back in the city, the images shifting and jumbling like a kaleidoscope: A girl from my school, her scream as she recognized me. There was one part where a character proposes a theory that homophobes are just closeted gay people hating on other gay people out of insecurity and inability to accept their own secret gayness. It was a lovely reading experience to be able to be smiling with giddiness one moment, but feeling heartbroken and wanting to cry the next. 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.

She knows from before just how cruel and violent people can be when they know the truth, and doesn't want to not only lose the new people in her life, but lose the life she currently has; with passing so easily, no-one has any clue about Amanda's past, so as long as no-one knows, she can simply be.It’s a very optimistic and feel good ending to a book that easily could have instead ended in tragedy.