I read Golden Boy by Abigail Tarttelin awhile ago and even now am unable to really get a grip on it, being from a small Midwestern village. The golden boy, Alex, is intersexual. What is intersexuality? I didn't know either. In the old days they referred to it as hermaphrodites. Simply put, it is a condition whereas the person has been born without XX (boy) or XY (girl) chromosomes. Yikes! Both male and female, yet neither. Feel free to look it up, and it certainly is fascinating, but I'm going to deal with the book rather than the condition.
Alex is a 15 year old high school boy, who is pictured as popular and normal in every way. He is a good soccer player and teammate, studious, smart, and wanted by all the girls. He is a bit slight, more pretty than handsome and adored by his mom, dad and little brother.
And yet he and his folks, and just a small hand full of people, know that he has both a vagina and a penis. One night one of his best friends who apparently came across the information from his parents falls into bed with him while inebriated and has sex. All the drama unfolds when Alex becomes pregnant. This sets off a panicky few hundred pages of what Alex has to face:
1. Will he get an abortion?
2. Will he keep the child?
3. Will he begin identity surgery?
4. And if he does will he be assigned a girl or boy.
5. He must decide within a few days because once this surgery begins all chances of a future family will cease, one of the byproducts of assignment surgery.
6. He has a girlfriend, what will happen with that?
7. Will he lose his friends?
It was a harrowing book and when I think of all the issues teens have to go through, then throw something like this in the mix and it is even more so.
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Check out this in Amazon and you will see it is highly recommended, something like 4 1/2 out of 5 stars with well over 2,000 readers recommending it. I don't know how. It is a story about a family in Michigan who is close to losing their home. The evangelical father becomes blinded and sends the narrator, his son, to his father's family in Texas to locate a hidden cache of money his father hid long ago. It is, mercifully, a short book, highly unbelievable, mediocre and redeemed only by its occasional pleasant scenes. But the parts don't add up to a very good book so it is best to just move along.
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I'm taking a break from fiction for awhile, thanks to Sam Torode, and read some non-fiction.
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