Phoebe Gloeckner

Holy shit, what a book! Not a young adult novel in the traditional sense but a really complex, densely textured coming of age novel that explores some seriously complicated dynamics between kids and adults. Also a really sympathetic look at promiscuity and the ways in which it might begin as kind of a pathology in very young girls but it is by no means any kind of life sentence. I've always been frustrated by the ways in which girls' books are already at a disadvantage because the male gaze is the default, the way we explore universal truths and abstractions and blah blah blah; tell the same story with a female narrator and it's all of a sudden "...from the perspective of a girl" like it's a handicap, like it might as well be from the dog's point of view. And if the narrator is female, and isn't pre-pubescent or sexless or otherwise "neutral," then it's suddenly loaded. Trust me, I went to college, I know! So it's SO NICE and SO REFRESHING to have a book about a promiscuous young girl that is not "about" promiscuity, or "about" being a girl, but a coming of age book in the same tradition as Catcher in the Rye, about something bigger, more universal, abstract. Excellent, I loved it so much.… (meer)