Also, your comment about the Latina YA author had me reflecting on comments made by my husband. I get so tired of people making assumptions about other people’s experiences just because they have not experienced such things themselves. I like that you throw in your reasons for why something does not work for you; I do agree that it is incredibly important to do so. It doesn’t mean the story is bad; it just means there is something in your past (experience/value/belief) that prevents you from accepting it as it is. Empathy. We need more of it in this world, and my favorite reviewers are the ones who bring empathy into their reviews, like you do.

No worries! It means you are consciously aware of the issues, even if no one has any easy answers. I can see how the marketing is misleading and yes, this does the book a huge disservice. It does the entire genre a disservice. Readers are intelligent; there is no need to pretend the book is about one thing rather than provide the truth from the very beginning. It will just piss off readers and cause them to shy away from other books marketed by them.

I should have been clearer. I meant that I hate when authors don’t offer an explicit counterpoint to something troubling in a book. For example, if a character suffers from depression, I appreciate if the author/narrative notes that there is therapy or help available even if the characters don’t make use of it.

I mean — my attitude isn’t that I don’t feel I have space to be honest about my reactions to books, although I do try to be aware of my privileges when I’m writing about books by authors from historically marginalized groups. It’s more that I wish I didn’t have caveats to give with this review. In particular, since my response to the book was heavily informed by a misleading marketing choice, I feel frustrated that marketing decisions led to this huge expectations gap that made me resent the book almost from the jump. You know? And while I would resent misleading marketing in any case, I particularly resent it for a book like Golden Boy where it’s one of so incredibly few books with intersex protagonists. I wish that I’d loved the book better, basically! I’m sad I didn’t love it better. Maybe I did a bad job of conveying that. :/

I’d also say that if I do write about books in a way that relays the unspoken message that I am uneducated / insensitive / biased against a marginalized group like intersex folks, I really hope that people would call me on it. You know? Like I can never get better and eradicate internalized prejudices that I haven’t realized I’ve got.

ALSO also, I read a Twitter thread one time by a Latina YA author who was talking about how heavily her work was informed by magic realism and Latin American literary conventions, and how she’d seen a lot of reviews criticizing her book for elements she’d put in there deliberately that were part of the Latin American literary tradition she came up in. And she said she didn’t mind the criticism or the idea that her type of writing wouldn’t work for some people, but that people acted like the conventions she was using were mistakes of a rookie writer. Like if someone reviewed Passengers and said “the idea of the ship they’re on is preposterous, only a foolish writer would come up with such a thing” — that would betray lack of knowledge of the trope of generation ships in science fiction. So I think about that a lot when I’m writing about books, and I try to be cognizant of that and be cautious about saying “this was a failure” vs “this didn’t work for me.” With Golden Boy, I truly think the marketing of the book (not the book itself) was a failure and a disservice to an important book.

Also, I wasn’t wild about Swing Time either. I have a whole big review coming up where I try to unpack why that is.

SORRY THIS REPLY IS SO LONG. As you can perhaps tell, I think about this stuff a lot. :p

I’d have been more fine with the gay character being the rapist if Max hadn’t spent so much time vehemently assuring everyone he wasn’t gay (because people keep asking). And I absolutely don’t think the author believes that gay folks are evil or rapists — I think she was trying to get at the assumptions people make about the intersections of gender identity and sexuality. The end result was just a teeny bit uncomfortable for me, is all.

Also, whoever told you “retarded” was fine to use in American English was nonsense. It’s not fine, American English has been done with that word for yeeeeeears.