Read as part of CBR17Bingo: reread. I’m replacing the reread square with a free one here because I enjoyed this book, wanted to write about it and it doesn’t fit neatly into another category.
When I was a kid, we didn’t have those conflabbed Hunger Games and young adult fantasy trilogies. We had Goosebumps and Babysitters Club and Matthew Christopher. We had real books, ones that were short and easy to digest, ones that didn’t touch on heavier themes beyond Being a kid sucks.
This book is for us.
Well…sort of.
Megan Milks writes an interesting 2-part tale on examination of the body: it’s transformation, it’s needs, and the justifications we make to combat those needs.
The first part of the book, we meet Margaret, who is clearly not happy with her weight. She is sad that a childhood detectives club with her and other girls has ended due to aging out. You see her sorrow play out in how she handles her circumstances. In between, you get stories-within-the-story on the surrealist, somatic “crimes” the girls solve, always related to the transformative experiences of bodies.
That part was the strongest and again had the strongest connection to the books of yore that I (and apparently Megan Milks) loved.
The second part, which takes place in a clinic with a very long wink-and-nod to Girl, Interrupted, continues to address bodies and there is a mystery later on but I couldn’t engage with it in the same way. It was trying to tell the next part of the story but I didn’t fully land with the tonal shift.
Still, this is a fun, heartbreaking novel on adolescence, transness, queerness, our struggles to accept our bodies and accept the change in our lives. I wish the whole book had been made out of the first part but I appreciate what Megan Milks was trying to do.