Skip to main content

What Else I've Been Reading















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.   


 👍
     





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.  
👎  


I'm taking a break from fiction for awhile, thanks to Sam Torode, and read some non-fiction.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Flashback Friday

Class, Or Lack Thereof The Dwight Vice gravestone in Oquawka, Illinois. I bring this old chestnut out every so often just to remind me that class is classless.  Dwight Vice was killed in his home near Oquawka in 2001.  It was one of those things that can generate crime:  two guys thought Dwight had a lot of money stashed at home because of his pot-selling sideline to supplement his fishing job.   Not really one of those big drug deals gone-bad things.  Marijuana was, according to the trial, about the only stuff Dwight sold.   But these two guys barge into the house and killed Dwight and attempted to kill his 11 year old kid, Darryl, before they took off with what money they could find.   His son, now 23, was stabbed in the back and left for dead.  He survived and is wheelchair bound and has undergone several surgeries to repair his wounds.  He will be paralyzed for life.   None of this is pleasant.  Reading the f...
Post a Comment
Read more

Florida Air Museum - Part 3

Welcome back to a pretty neat tour of the Florida Air Museum in Lakeland Florida.  There's a lot to see and a couple of the old Geezer Gold Wing guys are already sitting down instead of walking around looking at the exhibits. That's John who is wore out and making a call to his wife.  In all honesty, John was pretty well bushed before the ride.  He told me his daughter's family was down from one of the Carolina's with the grand kids and he must have played with them too much.   He's about to take off on his own and head for home, but he's going to miss a couple of neat things out on Hangar A.   But, before we walk over there, we have lots yet to see here.  If you saw The Aviator with Leonardo DiCaprio playing Howard Hughes, you'll remember that he went up in a plane during the filming of one of his movies to prove a point about flying.  He crashed trying to execute a roll and this is a picture of the plane he crashed.  No...
1 comment
Read more

Summer Swim

It's Monday and the start of another work week.  Except for me.  I have the week off because the parents of my daycare charges are taking the week off, too. This is one of those wordless posts I love on Mondays so I can put my laziness in full view of loyal readers.  These pics need no words.  Why muddy the waters?   They were taken at the pool at Sinkhole Estates aka Death Valley.  The nice thing about this pool is it is heated in winter.  If one must find positives in one's situation, I suppose that is one.  But, please, no more.   
Post a Comment
Read more