The Other Side

One of the great treats of living with a particularly voracious reader, like Child No. 1, is that she brings home a really wide variety of books. She will read almost anything (provided I don't push it toward her too much), and this has brought both of us toward that great nation of previously unknown (to me) books: Boy Books.
I know, I know, they're not really boy books. I mean, just because a book has a main character of one specific gender, does that have to mean that only people of that same gender will like/understand/read that book? And isn't a great book great in its humanity? There aren't boy's and girl's painters, or sculptors, or musicians? Or if there are, can't we all be bigger than that, too?
I hope so. But it's not exactly how I have found the world to be.
Growing up as one of three sisters, the books that came my way were often handed down by an older sister who was very interested in Little Women, Ann of Green Gables, and so on. These are worthy books. But they have in common that very excellent and familiar narrator of young fiction: the bookish girl. Now, I am a HUGE fan of the bookish girls in the world, but being a bookish girl, reading about bookish girls, who themselves think about other bookish girls, can be...limiting. So imagine my fascination when Child No. 1 came home with this:
I thought, at first, that the title, and thus the book, was the horrified voice of a girl. But, seeing as the house was a terrible mess and I had lots of things to do and work worries to attend to, I decided instead to sit down on the couch and read it. All of it. And it is excellent.
It's (in some ways) the story of Bradley Chalkers, a boy who is everything that girls fear about boys: a bully, gross, clueless, mean, angry, large, overwhelming. In no way is he an everyman; he is troubled and difficult and committed to being BAD. But this is his book and holds tight both to his powerful difficulties and his humanity, never sacrificing one for the other. It never tries to make him "normal" or easy. Its eponymous scene allowed me that rare thing: a moment of crystallizing insight into just how massive and ridiculous the divide between the genders is. How scary we look to them, how scary they look to us. It made me so happy to see that my girl might have the opportunity to see a boy depicted this way, to have a glimpse inside one boy's head, and know that there really is a person there.
And this is just one. A whole slew of amazing books seem to have appeared between my being a child and my having one. I will try to post more about them here.