Book Review: The Handsome Girl & Her Beautiful Boy

The Handsome Girl & Her Beautiful Boy by B.T. Gottfred
Courtesy of NetGalley.com
Publication date May 8, 2018

The premise of this book makes you want to like it -- non-judgmental self-discovery should be everyone's luck to have. However, in order to get there, these characters took us on a shallow roller coaster ride of stereotypes. I liked the main characters as people, but everyone else around them played to the message instead of the story. If I suspended disbelief and went with the flow, I enjoyed the story, the struggle, the humor, the self-deprication. Granted, I'm not a teen in 2017-18, but I really wonder how authentic the thoughts and dialog were as opposed to being manipulated to convey a message. I understand it is fiction, so this book provides a point-of-reference for jumping into a dialogue with teens about gender issues. Teens reading this as fiction will enjoy it; teens hoping for a template for a self-help guide will be disappointed.