What a wonderful graphic memoir! Liz Prince is a girl who is definitely a tomboy, and feels like she never fits in because she doesn't adhere to society's expectations of a girl. She'd much rather wear boy clothes and watch baseball with her dad than wear dresses and practice putting on makeup with her best girlfriends. I'm so glad she had a mother as kind and understanding as her mother is, a mother who loved her just the way she was and didn't mind that she'd rather wear boys' clothes. (It breaks my heart when I see mothers shoehorn their little girls into being pink and frilly and ruffly, like they're pets instead of children. Granted, my younger daughter loves dolls and the colors pink and purple and wearing dresses, but that's her choice. My elder daughter loves blue and green and is much more comfortable in jeans.)One can hope that with all the awareness we have now about gender and the fact that there is no true "normal" that little kids nowadays won't have to feel the ostracization and the societal pressure that Liz did. Unfortunately, I know that a lot of young people still have closed minds and would expect kids to adhere to gender roles. One of my dear friends has a son who happens to have long hair, and he gets teased about looking like a girl by strangers. Why do we feel the need to force kids into one box or another? Grown men can have long hair, and grown women (myself included) have short hair. Why can't our kids make the same choices without fear of being bullied for those choices?This is truly an excellent memoir of growing up different from the norm, and I feel like it should be required for just about everyone. Well done, Ms. Prince. Oh man. I can get a little fed up with graphic novel memoirs because they seem a little self-serving rather than interesting or enlightening, but Liz Prince's story really spoke to the tomboy in me. She might argue that I'm not a true tomboy anymore for I now own more dresses than pants, and you wouldn't catch me in a men's "t-shirt" unless I had thoroughly reconstructed it so that it no longer resembled what it once was. All that said...I did spend most of my youth protesting dresses, bleaching my bangs, wearing only boys tennis shoes, and otherwise making fun of girls (in my head) for wearing make up and short skirts. Prince does a great job of exploring all of this from her then love of ghostbusters and popples and baseball (something I share!) to her understanding of the difference between hating girls and hating being a girl..to the realization that she hated that someone was telling her how to be a girl. She's so insightful and inspirational really for any girl who doesn't feel like she's up to the task of being a girl in the most conventional terms. (Also, I like Prince, beat video games before boys did much to their chagrin...repeatedly)
What do You think about Tomboy: A Graphic Memoir (2014)?
I was hoping this would be more reminiscent of my tomboy childhood, but it was not
—amish
