I loved Girl Meets Boy. Smith offers a well-written, memorable version of the myth of Iphis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iphis) from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I loved reading every page. I wish Girl Meets Boy had been several hundred pages longer. I have read another two novels by Smith, The Accidental and There But For The and didn’t think much of them. I find it odd that I loved Girl Meets Boy so much. It reminds me of the brilliant story The World With Love in her collection First Love and Other Stories.I like the way Smith structures Girl Meets Boy. She writes in a stream of consciousness style. This is the first time I have actually enjoyed this style. I think it’s is partly because this novel is so short. The opening section alternates between the two characters, Imogen and her sister Anthea and focuses on childhood memories. The rest of the sections alternate between the viewpoints of both sisters using a first person narrator. I liked the way Smith used a first person narrator. This created an intimacy with the characters.One of the best bits about Girl Meets Boy is the relationship between Anthea and Robin, the female echo warrior she falls for after Robin vandalises the billboard outside the big corporation the sister’s work for. Smith perfectly captures the feeling of first love. Anthea’s reaction to Robin reminds me of the moment, ten years ago when I fell for another girl. Smith creates a realistic portrayal of falling for someone, how the world is suddenly all shiny and new when you’re falling. I loved their relationship. I felt it was realistic and believable. Smith reminded me of my own experiences of coming out. I love the way Smith, gay herself tackles lesbianism in Girl Meets Boy without Robin or Anthea dying or ending up with a man (that happens a lot on bad gay fiction).I thought the characterisation was great in Girl Meets Boy. Smith manages to make the sisters very real. I loved being inside both of their heads. I especially loved it when Imogen is freaking out about her sister being a gay and her memories of going to the same school as Robin and bullying her. The other character’s including their boss at the firm they work for were also very real. I was impressed by how good the characterisation was for such a short novel. A writer has less space for characters to develop.There are some stand out moments in Girl Meets Boy. My favourite part is the section from Imogen’s viewpoint where she’s freaking out about Anthea and Robin’s relationship. She has an internal monologue as she’s going about her daily life. She refers to her sister as a gay. She blames her mother for leaving their father then the Spice Girls. Her thoughts verge on homophobia as she seems obsessed with being normal and wonders if neighbours saw Robin and Anthea embracing and kissing in the street and this means they’ll need to move house. This part of the novel is hilarious. Girl Meets Boy features one of the big sex scenes I’ve ever read where there is no mention of body parts. I also found the sections that deal with the corporation the sister’s work for plans to dominate the world with bottled water very witty. I loved it when Anthea and Robin are arrested for covering the city in graffiti protesting women’s rights.I even enjoyed the unusual way Smith chooses to end Girl Meets Boy. Anthea fantasises about getting married to Robin. They have a huge ceremony attended by hundreds of people including family, friends and loved ones who have passed on. I’ve read some reviews that criticise this but I thought it was great. I thought it showed Anthea’s hope for the future and her love for Robin.
Girl Meets Boy is part of the Canongate Myths series; a series of modern retellings of classical myths and/or religious texts that are often laced with contemporary allegory. Ali Smith's entry in the series tackles a the tale of Daphne and Ianthi and where the Greek myth blurred the lines between gender and ancient propriety, Girl Meets Boy essentially follows suit.Smith plays with ideas of gender norms and stereotypes throughout this novella, intentionally mixing gender nomenclature and twisting and turning language to argue that the creation of gender is a human construct, not one of biology, and that physical organs or biological differences make no difference to an individual's status as a human. This is all very true, of course, and extremely pertinent in our seemingly lapsing and increasingly right-wing Western world, but I can't help but feel that Smith's delivery of her chosen subject, and her zeal in getting her message across are just a little bit limited by the fact that her delivery is actually rather dry and a little bit dull.I feel as if, as a student of literature, I should be lauding this as a work of genius. Smith does all of the things that a true member of the post modernist literati absolutely has to do to be worth their salt: she removes any semblance of syntax around conversation, she intentionally blurs the boundaries between the spoken word and stream of consciousness and she continually wrong foots her readership through an awkwardly swaying narrative. This ticks all of the right boxes from a literature student's perspective. There are also some quite complex themes at play and some clever use of language that could be used in the hands of a seasoned critic to write rather a compelling essay. As an academic text, I'm sure it's excellent. But, reading it for fun it's just a bit bloody boring.Some of the other Canongate Myths: Weight by Jeanette Winterson, Ragnarok by A.S. Byatt and Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman actually look at what lies beneath the myth and work really hard to analyse the historical context of their source material whilst producing a compelling story. It felt to me that Smith was just a little bit too caught up in the deconstruction and the 'look at me, I'm clever' literary stuff to produce a genuinely compelling yarn, and surely the joy of the story itself is why we read fiction in the first place. Without it, it's like looking at a painting via the mediator of a black and white photograph. The ideas are there but the life and soul are missing. It's a shame. It really is, and the most I can give this is a two.
What do You think about Girl Meets Boy (2007)?
I would give it two stars ... because I was swearing blind (what? ones) as I was reading BUT ... the image of Robin in her Scottish kilt up the ladder fighting against the establishment bs is hard to forget. I don't want to trash this book too much because a friend of mine recommended it (wink wink), but let's say that I feel better having read it than when reading it ... Didn't like the sister narrating her homophobia (although eventually withdrawing from it), and I didn't get the whole myth sh
—Paloma Etienne
Another day, another terrific novel from Ali Smith. I have resolved to gobble up her canon in the most heroic time possible, like an overweight man backing a lorryload of curries and waffles into his ecstatic gob. In Glasgow we have a meal called the Everything & More, which is enough food for an entire Ethiopian village in a bucket. Battered.This delightful story frames the myth of Iphis (woman disguises her daughter as a man, daughter turns into a man later on) within a tale of sexual identity and social injustice in contemporary Inverness. Flicking between sisters Imogen and Anthea, Imogen is a young go-getting business type working for Pure Water while Anthea is her younger sister who falls in love with the mannish girl Robin. In no time at all, Anthea is spray-painting Inverness with radical slogans and Imogen is learning about the darker side of global commerce (as if there’s a light side). Imogen’s sections use internal monologue and more parentheses than is healthy in one novel, while Anthea’s sections are in more straightforward first-person. This is certainly a lighter work from Smith, despite the polemic at the heart of the text, but it’s still better than you, me, them and us.
—MJ Nicholls
after i read girl meets boy i realized it was a lot more like what i had expected eugenides' middlesex to be than middlesex actually was. i will definitely read this again, perhaps when more in the mood for a love story, and i'm interested in reading more of ali smith's work.it is a book that plays out at a break-neck pace, except for the moments where the language is allowed to meander into scenes of poetry and gives one pause in the midst of beauty. there is much to love in ali smith's finesse with language. this novel contains retellings but i don't think this novel is so much a retelling of the myth of iphis, even though that's how it was positioned as part of "the myths series" published by canongate books, but rather it uses that story as the fulcrum on which it turns. there are very interesting characters here, and notions about people, and love, and sexuality, and the myths that we tell and retell to ourselves, to each other. there's not really much in the way of plot but that doesn't much matter because the writing is so engaging, and the book is so short that you don't miss it. i had trouble with some of the pop culture references at the beginning of the novel which made it harder for me to find my bearings: it seemed that if i were british, i would understand some of it better. i didn't know what the generation game was and it wasn't really explained, and the description of blind date confused me because i'd only seen american blind date, and it didn't seem to be anything like british blind date. ultimately i did find myself wishing that the book wasn't so short, and that the writer had given me a bit more time with some of her characters, especially the grandparents we meet at the beginning of the novel. the book has potentials oozing through its pages, and when it was over, it did feel like there was book wasn't finished, that it was a sketch of a book, that it could say much more.
—Maureen
