Showing posts with label Heroines with Heart. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Heroines with Heart. Show all posts
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Heroines With Heart 2013 Book Tour
Earlier this month I was asked to take part in a book review group called Heroines with Heart.  I really liked the concept of a large group of new writers using bloggers like myself to promote their new books. A lot of the authors are YA authors which is a genre I haven't exactly delved into yet, so I figured this would be an amazing opportunity.  So for my first selection I chose to review Confessions of a Teenage Hermaphrodite by Lianne Simon.  Now I a sure some of my readers are like "what, what now".  I was too but one of the subjects I teach in Psychology is all about intersexed conditions.  I am absolutely fascinated by the subject so I figured this would be a fun YA read.  It was, I finished the book in only two weeks while reading only on my computer (the only downside is a lot of books are PDF files not kindle set up).  I thought it was absolutely fascinating.  The main character Jamie/Jameson was so well written that you felt were right there experiencing the story with him/her.  The story takes through Jameson dealing with the fact that he has wanted to be a boy, yet seemingly his parents have wanted him to be a girl.  It is a great story of self discovery and a look into the emotional roller coaster that is the life of a teenager who is born intersexed.  The only aspect of the story that I really enjoyed was the time period.  It was set in the Vietnam era which added a who other dimension to the story.  The acceptance of some and the complete rejection of others of his condition (sadly I would say today's society isn't much different).  The only thing that I did not like about the book, was that I wanted more. Some of the story lines and characters were not developed as much as I would have liked.  Now the book was only 200 pages and YA so this may be why those characters and story lines were not developed in more detail.  In fact, I felt that the book ended way to quickly and I was wanting more details about the end few scenes of the book.  Now again, I don't think this is a fatal flaw of the book, just that I wished Simon had developed some of the story lines a bit more.  Then again if she had done that it might not be as appealing to a YA audience.  As I said at the beginning I am not that well versed in YA literature so maybe this is something that happens some story lines get more of a background then they would in a "regular" book.  Overall I thought this was a very interesting read and well worth the time.  I would give it 3 1/2 stars.