A Book Review Starring "Alex As Well" by Alyssa Brugman

(this is a review of an Advanced  Reader Copy)

The short version:
Australian teen Alex Stringfellow harbors a big secret, she feels she's a girl, not the boy she was raised to be. After being bullied at her old school she takes it upon herself to enroll in a new school as a girl where she makes friends and finally feels like the person she was meant to be (despite her parents resistance). Needing a birth certificate that identifies her as a girl in order to complete enrollment she employs a lawyer (solicitor, if you will) to help her get a new one, despite the repercussions involved in trying to explain who she is to her parents.

The long version:
So much of the plot felt flimsy, underdeveloped.

Like a kid being able to just switch schools and enroll herself (maybe they do it differently in Australia). Or the subplot involving Alex's crush on one girl, but treating a girl who likes her in a brazen yet aloof fashion (for someone who's struggling with their identity AND their sexuality to be so easily brazen was pretty unbelievable). The mother was a one-dimensional narcissistic tyrant, which she's entitled to be (it's not my book after all), but after so many interactions, her breakdowns became repetitive and boring to read. Though I did enjoy how the author told her point of view via postings to a motherhood website, and then delivered a bevy of responses in the comments section from other moms (some responses good, others bias and odd, as would be on a comments section). Both parents were so thoroughly in denial, which is quite realistic and possible but still made them pretty uninteresting and repetitive (how many times will they tell Alex it's all her fault? Multiple throughout the book, but without any progression of the plot or real character development from Alex, all the scenes wind up being variations on the same one). My sense was these weren't character decisions but rather a matter of underdeveloped secondary characters and plot.

There were quite a few subplots that felt the same way, never felt thought through and didn't really amount to anything: the modeling thing, the parent's deception, the girl who develops a crush on Alex, the girl Alex develops a crush on, Alex's father figure relationship with the solicitor, Alex's grappling with both her intersex physical identity as well as her sexual orientation at the same time (which was also the most poorly handled, as there's so much that I would imagine could be mined from being intersex, raised as a boy, identifying as a girl AND discovering she's a lesbian. It was as if having all these subplots allowed the author not to have to focus on writing a more fleshed out plot and main character, these subplots would just come and go to fill in the predetermined spaces as needed.

I don't think there's been a young adult novel to tackle a teen who is intersex and that's commendable. And I appreciated that, given the gravity of the subject matter, the author eschewed the explicit or graphic and wrote a story that could easily be given to a middle reader or early high school reader.

Sometimes I have to remind myself that it's their story, not the story I wish it would be.

I just wished this story was better written so that I bought it.