Rating: WARTY!
Note that this is based on an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
I really wanted to like this novel and rate it positively, because this genre is under-served and is nuanced with color and hue. These stories need to be told, but this one was so larded with flimsy black & white caricatures that ti could barely move without falling over itself, and it became impossible for me to continue reading it. I made it about halfway through and I could not bring myself to read on. I think middle graders need better and can handle a much more grown-up story than is presented here, and LGBTQIA deserves to be served better than a blue plate special.
The story is of Olivia, who insists upon being called Liv because for some considerable time she's felt like she's a boy, and not a girl. She's starting middle school and is offended by the fact that girls are not allowed to wear pants, but must wear skirts, and she rebels against it - hence the title. I found this to be unbelievable in a school that was purportedly as good and progressive as this one was supposed to be. It would have been far more rebellious had the main character been mtf transgender and wanted to wear a skirt, as The new Statesman pointed out back in March this year.
Liv had an important story to tell, but it was buried under the weight of caricature, cliché, and trope. The school is not populated with real students and teachers, but with cardboard stand-ins. There's the trope cool guy who befriends Liv; there's the caricature of a female school bully who was so far beyond belief as to be a joke. Not one of the teachers reins her in (once - it happened once in the half I read), which is absurd. The school principal is quite accurately described by the term "sexist pig." I find it incredible that he would be where he is and not one teacher has a problem with it. This is the twenty-teens not the 1950's.
The clichés run outside of school, too. Liv has to have two moms, one named Mom and the other named Mamma. Mamma is an Italian stereotype. The family dog not only has a pretentious name (Garibaldi) but also has three legs. In this brand of story, the moms will run either a bookstore or a delicatessen, and here it was the latter. I kept waiting to hear about the kitchen sink, because I knew that had to be in there somewhere.
This message is important, but here it was cheapened and ridiculed by the story and it deserved to thrive in a much more realistic milieu than ever it had here. I cannot in good faith recommend this.
