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A review by spenkevich
Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith
5.0
‘Nobody grows up mythless…It’s what we do with the myths we grow up with that matters.’
Sometimes the right book finds you. Reading Ali Smith’s Girl meets boy felt like a book I was always meant to encounter, a book I, as a reader, had come together in all the ideal ways for this book to fully immerse itself in my heart and soul. ‘Some stories always need telling more than others,’ Smith writes, and for me this is certainly one of those. Using the story of Iphis and Ianthe as the heart of the story and spirit of it’s themes, Girl meets boy becomes a gorgeous meditation on fighting for freedom from the subjugation of social constructs and narratives built for the purpose of gatekeeping power, challenging the modern myth-making of corporate marketing and embracing a joyful fluidity of identity. This is a book that made me feel seen, understood, and empowered, and read like a celebration of the possibilities of life. With a balance of humor and fierce criticism told through blissfully beautiful prose and a narrative that rotates between the perspectives of two sisters, Anthea and Imogen Gunn, Ali Smith combines the modern myths while honoring those of the past in a raucous and rebellions little novella that has completely stolen my heart.
‘I was a she was a he was a we were a girl and a girl and a boy and a boy, we were blades, were a knife that could cut through myth.’
At its core, Girl meets boy is a love story. One with searing prose on the way love can enrapture and awake you that reminds me of my personal favorite, [a:Jeanette Winterson|9399|Jeanette Winterson|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1561070665p2/9399.jpg], with queer love befitting lines such as ‘I had not known, before us, that every vein in my body was capable of carrying light.’ It is a story of Anthea meeting Robin—‘she was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen’—but also a love story to the myths we make, to protest, to freedom, to queer possibilities, to ‘the whole world, beautiful, various, waiting.’ This is a story about being free from the shackles of gender binaries (something that I really appreciate as an enby) to love that makes you realize you are ‘both genders, a whole new gender, no gender at all.’ And most importantly, the safety to embrace yourself this way. Goddamn, I can relate. I read most of this book with chills going through my entire being. I was grinning and cheering. This is a love story to love and I, in turn, love it with all my heart.
‘You’re going to have to learn the kind of hope that makes things history.’
Smith draws on the Roman myth of Iphis and Ianthe, such as it is told in [a:Ovid|1127|Ovid|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1651504074p2/1127.jpg]’s [b:Metamorphoses|59883426|Metamorphoses|Ovid|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1647260393l/59883426._SY75_.jpg|2870411]. In Smith’s book, Robin respects Ovid for being ‘very fluid, as writers go…he knows, more than most, that the imagination doesn’t have a gender.’ We find here that Girl meets boy is another tale in the spirit of Ovid who ‘honours all sorts of love…all sorts of story.’ You will be fine if you are unfamiliar with the myth as Smith explains it for you. Twice, actually. Once directly and then again in an adorable dialogue between Robin and Anthea as Robin explains the myth as the reason behind her artist name being Iphis (you’ll likely note the name Anthea is rather adjacent to Ianthe). Though the myth is layered in with Anthea’s grandfather’s stories, the novel opening with him saying ‘let me tell you about when I was a girl.’
‘You’re going to have to learn the kind of hope that makes things history.’
The use of names is rather blunt, yet effective. ‘You’re a walking peace protest,’ Robin tells Anthea who’s first name meaning flowers and her family name, Gunn, carries the clan motto Either Peace or War, ‘You’re the flower in the Gunn.’ This recalls two famous photos, The Ultimate Confrontation as well as the Pulitzer Prize-nominated photo Flower Power, the former taken by Marc Riboud of high school student Jan Rose Kasmir confronting a bayoneted gun with a chrysanthemum, the latter by photographer Bernie Boston of protester George Harris putting carnations in soldier’s loaded rifles aimed at unarmed civilians. Both were taken during the 1967 March on the Pentagon as a protest of the Vietnam War:
The Ultimate Confrontation
Flower Power
The spirit of resistance and public displays of protest is alive and well in Smith’s tale, beginning with the grandfather telling of the time she was accomplices with a woman’s suffragette named Burning Lily who protested by burning down factories (in the notes section, Smith says she was based on suffragette Lilian Lenton) and moving to Robin spray painting messages around the city. Such as outside Imogen and Anthea’s job at Pure, a bottled water company with aims not just for global distribution of overpriced water but becoming a corporation so large and octopus-like to have a hand in many industries.
‘You really think you’ll make a single bit of difference to all the unfair things and all the suffering and all the injustice and all the hardship with a few words?
Yes, she say.’
The peaceful protests of graffiti highlighting inequalities like gender pay gaps, femicides, or the ethical issues of reducing access to natural resources in order to profit from them are not always welcomed, and not just by the police. Average citizens fear their public art protests are too divisive or will drive tourists away. I loved this section, as my own public art displays (I left painting around town with favorite poems written on them) were shut down for “graffiti violations” and am a huge fan of public art. But here this is used as a way to interrogate ideas of who is allowed to direct the ‘dominant narrative’ of social discourse, and the ways those with money and power gatekeep modern myth-making.
I’ve always referred to marketing as ‘corporate fanfiction’ at best, it’s actually one of my degrees though I like to say I have a degree in propaganda. For my final course when asked what our biggest lesson about marketing is, I wrote that my biggest lesson is we shouldn’t manipulate public psychology for profit and instead dismantle corporate marketing (they then got to hand me a degree with highest honors for a 4.0 GPA). Understanding is not the same as condoning, and I do value knowing how it all works. But, needless to say, Ali Smith dunking on marketing was absolutely delightful to me.
Smith doesn’t pull any punches here, with the ‘Creative’ team meetings feeling rather cultish and the psychological manipulation and corporate myth-making being on full display. Anthea can’t buy into it, but Imogen does. We see Pure and corporate marketing as the antithesis to the messaging done by Robin, a battle to control the ‘persuasive myth’ either to set people free or to profit by subjugating them. Corporate buzzwords and capitalist messaging construct myths that elevate CEOs as the heroes of their own myths with skyscraper offices as the new Mt. Olympus from where they can frame the stories of the world and distort the public narratives to always be the freedom fighters even when curbing freedoms. ‘DDR…Deny Disparage Rephrase’ the Pure boss teaches. ‘Use the word terrorism,’ he instructs employees about speaking to the press about water protectors in India protesting that the dam built by Pure has killed their crops and polluted the only water access they have left. He says access to clean water is not a Right, but a Need, one they should exploit because they need money. ‘It’s international-government-ratified…Whether you think it’s bullshit or not. And I can do what I like.’ It would seem like cartoonish villany if this very thing wasn’t constantly so out in the open with people defending them all the time. As the graffiti in the book always says: ‘THIS MUST CHANGE.’
‘It’s easy to think it’s a mistake, or you’re a mistake. It’s easy, when everything and everyone you know tells you you’re the wrong shape, to believe you’re the wrong shape.’
Similarly, Smith addresses the narratives around gender and sexuality, such as how the natural love of Robin and Anthea is met with pushback. ‘My sister would be banned in schools if she was a book,’ Imogen thinks, a sentence that was rather alarming/amusing to read while in Florida, the state with the second most book bans in the US, usually over LGTBQ+ representation. The first section from Imogen’s perspective could be rather triggering—heads up—as it deals with her being shocked by Anthea coming out, though knowing Smith’s perspective on this you can see how she filters this with some humor like Imogen noting that Anthea had always liked Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Tracy Champman a lot which had to be foreshadowing. It does touch on how much gatekeeping and pushback there is over queer identities, usually most loudly by those outside of them without any experience in them insisting on controlling the narrative about them (like resistance to trans/nonbinary identities). This is reflected in the book with Imogen struggling to find the ‘correct’ way to term Robin and Anthea, only for Robin to effectively sidestep the whole thing. ‘The proper word for me, Robin Goodman says, is me.’
‘Now I had taken a whole new shape. No, I had taken the shape I was always supposed to, the shape that let me hold my head high. Me, Anthea Gunn, head turned towards the sun.’
I love Girl meets boy so much and it was the perfect book to read while on vacation. It does all lead to an uplifting ending, and while I am not usually one for overtly upbeat endings, this one earns it and we all deserve this ending. Especially after years of “kill your queers” or only focusing on suffering being a standard whenever there was queer representation in literature. This book is beautiful. It may be a touch heavy handed, but so are myths and Smith does an excellent job of recasting Ovid’s tale in a modern setting as a complementary story to the original. Perhaps my rating is a little inflated, perhaps I also don’t care, this book just made me very happy on a warm vacation and I’m fine with that. Its so many thing I enjoy thinking about all in one story. I shamefully had not read Ali Smith until now but this will certainly not be my last. Girl meets boy is an investigation into the power and necessity of stories, and a lovely story all to itself.
4.5/5
‘It was always the stories that needed the telling that gave us rope we could cross any river with. They balanced us high above any crevasse. They made us be natural acrobats. They made us be brave. They met us well. They changed us. It was in their nature to.’
Sometimes the right book finds you. Reading Ali Smith’s Girl meets boy felt like a book I was always meant to encounter, a book I, as a reader, had come together in all the ideal ways for this book to fully immerse itself in my heart and soul. ‘Some stories always need telling more than others,’ Smith writes, and for me this is certainly one of those. Using the story of Iphis and Ianthe as the heart of the story and spirit of it’s themes, Girl meets boy becomes a gorgeous meditation on fighting for freedom from the subjugation of social constructs and narratives built for the purpose of gatekeeping power, challenging the modern myth-making of corporate marketing and embracing a joyful fluidity of identity. This is a book that made me feel seen, understood, and empowered, and read like a celebration of the possibilities of life. With a balance of humor and fierce criticism told through blissfully beautiful prose and a narrative that rotates between the perspectives of two sisters, Anthea and Imogen Gunn, Ali Smith combines the modern myths while honoring those of the past in a raucous and rebellions little novella that has completely stolen my heart.
‘I was a she was a he was a we were a girl and a girl and a boy and a boy, we were blades, were a knife that could cut through myth.’
At its core, Girl meets boy is a love story. One with searing prose on the way love can enrapture and awake you that reminds me of my personal favorite, [a:Jeanette Winterson|9399|Jeanette Winterson|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1561070665p2/9399.jpg], with queer love befitting lines such as ‘I had not known, before us, that every vein in my body was capable of carrying light.’ It is a story of Anthea meeting Robin—‘she was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen’—but also a love story to the myths we make, to protest, to freedom, to queer possibilities, to ‘the whole world, beautiful, various, waiting.’ This is a story about being free from the shackles of gender binaries (something that I really appreciate as an enby) to love that makes you realize you are ‘both genders, a whole new gender, no gender at all.’ And most importantly, the safety to embrace yourself this way. Goddamn, I can relate. I read most of this book with chills going through my entire being. I was grinning and cheering. This is a love story to love and I, in turn, love it with all my heart.
‘You’re going to have to learn the kind of hope that makes things history.’
Smith draws on the Roman myth of Iphis and Ianthe, such as it is told in [a:Ovid|1127|Ovid|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1651504074p2/1127.jpg]’s [b:Metamorphoses|59883426|Metamorphoses|Ovid|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1647260393l/59883426._SY75_.jpg|2870411]. In Smith’s book, Robin respects Ovid for being ‘very fluid, as writers go…he knows, more than most, that the imagination doesn’t have a gender.’ We find here that Girl meets boy is another tale in the spirit of Ovid who ‘honours all sorts of love…all sorts of story.’ You will be fine if you are unfamiliar with the myth as Smith explains it for you. Twice, actually. Once directly and then again in an adorable dialogue between Robin and Anthea as Robin explains the myth as the reason behind her artist name being Iphis (you’ll likely note the name Anthea is rather adjacent to Ianthe). Though the myth is layered in with Anthea’s grandfather’s stories, the novel opening with him saying ‘let me tell you about when I was a girl.’
‘You’re going to have to learn the kind of hope that makes things history.’
The use of names is rather blunt, yet effective. ‘You’re a walking peace protest,’ Robin tells Anthea who’s first name meaning flowers and her family name, Gunn, carries the clan motto Either Peace or War, ‘You’re the flower in the Gunn.’ This recalls two famous photos, The Ultimate Confrontation as well as the Pulitzer Prize-nominated photo Flower Power, the former taken by Marc Riboud of high school student Jan Rose Kasmir confronting a bayoneted gun with a chrysanthemum, the latter by photographer Bernie Boston of protester George Harris putting carnations in soldier’s loaded rifles aimed at unarmed civilians. Both were taken during the 1967 March on the Pentagon as a protest of the Vietnam War:
The Ultimate Confrontation
Flower Power
The spirit of resistance and public displays of protest is alive and well in Smith’s tale, beginning with the grandfather telling of the time she was accomplices with a woman’s suffragette named Burning Lily who protested by burning down factories (in the notes section, Smith says she was based on suffragette Lilian Lenton) and moving to Robin spray painting messages around the city. Such as outside Imogen and Anthea’s job at Pure, a bottled water company with aims not just for global distribution of overpriced water but becoming a corporation so large and octopus-like to have a hand in many industries.
‘You really think you’ll make a single bit of difference to all the unfair things and all the suffering and all the injustice and all the hardship with a few words?
Yes, she say.’
The peaceful protests of graffiti highlighting inequalities like gender pay gaps, femicides, or the ethical issues of reducing access to natural resources in order to profit from them are not always welcomed, and not just by the police. Average citizens fear their public art protests are too divisive or will drive tourists away. I loved this section, as my own public art displays (I left painting around town with favorite poems written on them) were shut down for “graffiti violations” and am a huge fan of public art. But here this is used as a way to interrogate ideas of who is allowed to direct the ‘dominant narrative’ of social discourse, and the ways those with money and power gatekeep modern myth-making.
‘[D]o myths spring fully formed from the imagination and the needs of a society, I sad, as if they emerged from society’s subconscious? Or are myths conscious creations by the various money-making forces? For instance, is advertising a new kind of myth-making?’
I’ve always referred to marketing as ‘corporate fanfiction’ at best, it’s actually one of my degrees though I like to say I have a degree in propaganda. For my final course when asked what our biggest lesson about marketing is, I wrote that my biggest lesson is we shouldn’t manipulate public psychology for profit and instead dismantle corporate marketing (they then got to hand me a degree with highest honors for a 4.0 GPA). Understanding is not the same as condoning, and I do value knowing how it all works. But, needless to say, Ali Smith dunking on marketing was absolutely delightful to me.
Smith doesn’t pull any punches here, with the ‘Creative’ team meetings feeling rather cultish and the psychological manipulation and corporate myth-making being on full display. Anthea can’t buy into it, but Imogen does. We see Pure and corporate marketing as the antithesis to the messaging done by Robin, a battle to control the ‘persuasive myth’ either to set people free or to profit by subjugating them. Corporate buzzwords and capitalist messaging construct myths that elevate CEOs as the heroes of their own myths with skyscraper offices as the new Mt. Olympus from where they can frame the stories of the world and distort the public narratives to always be the freedom fighters even when curbing freedoms. ‘DDR…Deny Disparage Rephrase’ the Pure boss teaches. ‘Use the word terrorism,’ he instructs employees about speaking to the press about water protectors in India protesting that the dam built by Pure has killed their crops and polluted the only water access they have left. He says access to clean water is not a Right, but a Need, one they should exploit because they need money. ‘It’s international-government-ratified…Whether you think it’s bullshit or not. And I can do what I like.’ It would seem like cartoonish villany if this very thing wasn’t constantly so out in the open with people defending them all the time. As the graffiti in the book always says: ‘THIS MUST CHANGE.’
‘It’s easy to think it’s a mistake, or you’re a mistake. It’s easy, when everything and everyone you know tells you you’re the wrong shape, to believe you’re the wrong shape.’
Similarly, Smith addresses the narratives around gender and sexuality, such as how the natural love of Robin and Anthea is met with pushback. ‘My sister would be banned in schools if she was a book,’ Imogen thinks, a sentence that was rather alarming/amusing to read while in Florida, the state with the second most book bans in the US, usually over LGTBQ+ representation. The first section from Imogen’s perspective could be rather triggering—heads up—as it deals with her being shocked by Anthea coming out, though knowing Smith’s perspective on this you can see how she filters this with some humor like Imogen noting that Anthea had always liked Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Tracy Champman a lot which had to be foreshadowing. It does touch on how much gatekeeping and pushback there is over queer identities, usually most loudly by those outside of them without any experience in them insisting on controlling the narrative about them (like resistance to trans/nonbinary identities). This is reflected in the book with Imogen struggling to find the ‘correct’ way to term Robin and Anthea, only for Robin to effectively sidestep the whole thing. ‘The proper word for me, Robin Goodman says, is me.’
‘Now I had taken a whole new shape. No, I had taken the shape I was always supposed to, the shape that let me hold my head high. Me, Anthea Gunn, head turned towards the sun.’
I love Girl meets boy so much and it was the perfect book to read while on vacation. It does all lead to an uplifting ending, and while I am not usually one for overtly upbeat endings, this one earns it and we all deserve this ending. Especially after years of “kill your queers” or only focusing on suffering being a standard whenever there was queer representation in literature. This book is beautiful. It may be a touch heavy handed, but so are myths and Smith does an excellent job of recasting Ovid’s tale in a modern setting as a complementary story to the original. Perhaps my rating is a little inflated, perhaps I also don’t care, this book just made me very happy on a warm vacation and I’m fine with that. Its so many thing I enjoy thinking about all in one story. I shamefully had not read Ali Smith until now but this will certainly not be my last. Girl meets boy is an investigation into the power and necessity of stories, and a lovely story all to itself.
4.5/5
‘It was always the stories that needed the telling that gave us rope we could cross any river with. They balanced us high above any crevasse. They made us be natural acrobats. They made us be brave. They met us well. They changed us. It was in their nature to.’