Tag: one of the boys

One of the Boys is a novel about a trans girl who returns to playing football in her final year of high school, dealing with being caught between the sport she loves and if she has a place within it. Grace Woodhouse used to be a stereotypical jock: on the football team, popular girlfriend, eyes on a college football scholarship. That was, until she came out as trans, leaving the football team and her former life behind. Back at school for senior year, she’s navigating the loss of her sport and built-in friendship group, but when her old teammates convince her to come back, her non-football friends think she’s crazy and there are a lot of hurdles in the way. Grace has to consider what is important to her and what the future after high school might hold.

This is the kind of young adult novel that should be read by anyone, because it is just a great coming of age story about being trans and having to decide what to keep from your past and who you want to be as you grow up. There’s a lot of nuance, not only in Grace’s story but in everyone’s in the novel, and a real sense that high school isn’t everything, and the person you are at the age of eighteen isn’t the end of anything. There’s so many great characters, some with small roles, and others with larger, but everyone gets something going on, even just in the background, which felt very real to what it is like as a teenager at school when there’s so many people you peripherally know or are aware of. I liked how it plays with classic ideas of cliques, like the football players and the theatre kids, but Grace was there trying to convince them that maybe things aren’t so clear cut

It is also a small town America story, specifically Western New York, and how that might shape being trans and a lesbian and loving football, and how it shapes the people around her too. Strangely for a British person, this has a very specific subsection of things I do know about (I’ve been to Brockport, my sister played American football on a men’s team), and I really liked all the details, even appreciating those (mostly all the football stuff) that I’m not so familiar with. I also like how the book explains more about football than it does about being trans, because the book is really about exploring your passion and what happens when your relationship to it changes, rather than being just focused on Grace’s gender.

This book was delightful to read, heartwarming yet with enough grit to make it more compelling than a fairytale version of this narrative. There’s so much packed into it, but ultimately, it’s a coming of age tale about doing what you love, finding your path after school, and how being trans changes the future you thought you had mapped out.