Alex As Well

November 17, 2014
Despite her parents’ insistence, Alex knows she’s a girl. And while she’s still discovering her personal history, this battle has old roots: born intersex, Alex was declared a boy and put on hormones. Now 14, she has stopped taking her meds, transferred to a co-ed school, and is intent on changing her life. The costs are high: Alex’s father leaves, and her emotionally unstable mother loses whatever grip she had. Brugman (Finding Grace) gives Alex a running dialogue with her male self (also Alex), who was trained in masculinity, and doesn’t always know how to handle himself around girls or during the modeling gigs that Alex lands. Both Alexes are game, clear, and sometimes funny, and watching Alex navigate her new terrain is rewarding. But the book also includes Alex’s mother’s distraught, typo-riddled posts to a parenting website (complete with reader comments), which feels gimmicky and ill advised. While these passages show that parenting an intersex child can be confusing, they give readers information Alex doesn’t have, dramatically lessen sympathy for Alex’s mother, and aren’t needed to make Alex relatable. Ages 14–up.

October 15, 2014
Against her narcissistic parents' wishes, a teen with an intersex condition decides to start living as a girl.When the story opens, Alex has been off the male hormones her parents make her take for five days. She has also told her parents that she wants to live as a girl, which has resulted in her father's leaving and her mother's becoming furious at what she believes to be meaningless and hostile teenage rebellion. Alex impulsively enrolls herself in a new school, a move that requires surprisingly little paperwork-with the thorny exception of a birth certificate. Alex meets friends for the first time as a girl, begins an unexpected modeling career and works with an unusually accommodating lawyer to correct the gender on her birth certificate. Alex's voice is bouncy, high-energy and strewn with well-chosen pop-song lyrics. Her first-person narrative voice is often shown in adversarial and sometimes-comic dialogue with a second, male Alex. Interspersed with Alex's narrative are her mother's increasingly unhinged and self-absorbed message-board posts about the situation. Most disturbingly, readers learn from the posts that Alex's mom is slipping Alex hormones without her knowledge-a choice that, oddly, is never revealed to Alex. Alex is a winning character, but the glimpses into her mother's twisted point of view are both unsettling and unnecessary. (Fiction. 12-18)

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November 1, 2014

Gr 10 Up-Fifteen-year-old Alex Stringfellow has lived her entire life feeling like she's two people, male and female. Though previously identified as male, Alex decides to begin living as a female. What Alex doesn't know is that she was born intersex, and her parents had chosen not to tell her. To make her transition to living as a female easier, Alex enrolls in a new school where she quickly makes friends. While her adjustment is mostly smooth, Alex is concerned about how her friends will react if they find out she's a lesbian or if they find out about her "noodle." Her transition at home is less easy. After telling her parents, "I'm a girl," Alex's father leaves home and her mother struggles with Alex's gender identity and often handles it with fits, abuse, and attempts to control her child. Her absent father offers little support. Adding dimension to the teen's story are her internal conversations with the male and female sides of herself, and her mother's blog posts and the ensuing comments from readers. Brugman tackles a sensitive issue with grace and grit. The strong protagonist often acts with more maturity than her parents. This work is best suited for fans of problem novels, teens struggling with identity issues of all kinds, and readers looking for a good contemporary fiction title that has teeth.-Adrienne L. Strock, Teen Library Manager, Nashville Public Library

Copyright 2014 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2014
Grades 8-11 This slim but thought-provoking Australian import follows a 14-year-old intersex teen (born with both male and female reproductive organs) making the transition to being a girl. Raised as a boy, Alex nonetheless has always felt like a girl; Brugman conveys this duality by having the two Alexes dialogue in her head. As Alex enrolls in a new school as a female, buys new clothes and makeup, and looks for a lawyer to help reassign her gender on her birth certificate, her hysterical mother copes poorly. Instead of communicating with Alex, she takes to posting her feelings on an online motherhood forum, where comments from others either support or criticize her parenting. While this provides a frame of reference for Alex's mother's unsympathetic behavior, and a way to explore how people think of sexuality and gender, it's the least successful part of an otherwise strong story. Alex narrates her predicament with likable casualness, and it's easy to root for her as she stands up for herself and finds another support system.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)