Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I'd give it 10 stars if I could, 26 Mar 2008
It's very rare that a book makes me cry real, actual, physical tears, but Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith had me sobbing like a Brownie. Tears of happiness I might add: tears of happiness for the characters, and tears of happiness because the novel itself, the words Ali Smith had written, were just perfect.
The book is a modern-day retelling of the myth of Iphis, one of the few happy moments in Ovid's Metamorphoses, where Iphis the girl is transformed into Iphis the boy in time to marry Ianthe (a girl), the love of her/his life. In Smith's version, there are two sisters in Inverness, Midge (or Imogen) and Anthea. Midge works for Pure, a company selling bottled water to the middle class masses, while Anthea is dreamier. Anthea falls in love with Robin - a girl with her name spelled the boys way - when she daubs anti-capitalist slogans on the outside of the Pure building.
As the chapters jump from Anthea's voice, to Midge's, and back, we see two sisters coming to terms with their lives and their loves and their true feelings. The endings for both girls are truly euphoric both in plot terms and in the tone of Smith's evocative, provocative stream of consciousness prose:
"We'd thought we were along, Robin and I. We'd thought it was just us, under the trees outside the cathedral. But as soon as we'd made our vows there was a great whoop of joy behind us, and when we turned round we saw all the people, there must have been hundreds, they were clapping and cheering, they were throwing confetti, they waved and they roared celebration."
Ali Smith is at her best, too, when she writes about love. Rarely do I find a writer that can encapsulate the very essence of what it feels like to be in love, but she does it. And she did it in this book time and time again... there were passages I read over and over again just to savour the words and sentences and the feelings they evoked. I could almost taste them.
"I had not known, before us, that every vein in my body was capable of carrying light, like a river seen from a train makes a channel of sky etch itself deep into a landscape. I had not known that I could be so much more than myself."
And as if all this didn't tick enough of my boxes, Girl Meets Boy also contains a heartfelt rallying cry for women's rights. I shall leave you with these words, as they appear in this marvelous, beautiful little gem of a book:
"...sexual or domestic violence affects one out of three women and girls worldwide and it is the world's leading cause of injury and death for women... THIS MUST CHANGE"
Go on yoursel', Ali.
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21 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Another brilliant book by Ali Smith, 3 Nov 2007
I'm a huge fan of all of Ali Smith's work and think that her latest offering at the pyre of reading is as good as anything she has written. She just seems to be getting better and better.
In Girl Meets Boy she takes the wonderful but fairly obscure myth of Iphis, a myth of transformation that is unlike anything I have ever come across before. In her hands it is recast and rewoven into something truly magnificent, a contemporary tale set in Inverness that will delight and devastate in equal measure. I cried on a number of occasions but they were sometimes tears of joy. I don't want to say anything else about the story as that might spoil it for you, other than "Go and buy this book". It is beautifully written, so ingeniously structured and wise in so many ways. Ali Smith is a goddess indeed who deserves to be worshipped!!
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Astonishingly good, 26 Jul 2008
I always enjoy Ali Smith's writing, but have found some of her books to work better than others. "Girl Meets Boy" is the best novel of hers that I have read. It is quite simply sensational and shows an author on the top of her form and completely in tune with her subject.
One of a series in which ancient myths are rewritten as modern stories by a range of authors, this is part love story, part fable, and in part a depiction of the modern corporate world. The characters are brilliantly real - even if this is a modern myth - and what Smith has to say about love and life in this little book is inspirational, not to mention very entertaining. Every piece of dialogue rings true and there are truly great passages such as the very believable (and funny) inner thoughts of Imogen, a.k.a. "Midge" as she realises her sister has fallen in love with another girl; and the stream of consciousness of Anthea expressing how it feels to be in love with Robin.
It is a cliche, but I did actually struggle to put this book down. For its writing, but also its powerfully uplifting message and life-affirming qualities, I must give this book five stars. If only all fiction was as good as this.
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