July 8, 2013
In this intense and fearless U.S. debut from English writer Tarttelin, high school star Max Walker has good grades, good looks, the esteem of his classmates, and a strong family with successful parents. He also has a chromosomal pattern that is both male and female. Intersex children like Max are often assigned surgically to one gender or the other at birth, but Max's parents raised him as a boy while deciding against removing his female reproductive organs. Tarttelin gives us a ferocious introduction to one of the repercussions of that decision: Max is raped and becomes pregnant by a childhood friend who sees him as more girl than boy. After this early traumatizing scene, the novel stays bleak, as Max goes from "golden boy" to desperate. With empathy and imagination, Tarttelin describes an adolescent search for identity made monstrous by Max's uncertainty over that self-identifier most of us take for granted: am I a man or a woman? Tarttelin, through Max, struggles to get the other characters, and the reader, to grasp the pain of being intersex with the depth of understanding he longs for, but the love and acceptance of little brother Daniel shines throughout.