Book Review: GEORGE by Alex Gino
FACTS ABOUT THE BOOK
Title: GEORGE
Author: Alex Gino
Publisher: Scholastic
Price: £6.99
Pages: 215
Genre: LGBTQ - transgender girl, Children's book
Year: 2017
BACK OF THE BOOK
WHAT IS IT ABOUT?
This book is about George, who is 10 years old and looks like a boy but feels like a girl.
When her class takes part in a school play of "Charlotte's Web", George wants nothing more but to play the main character, the spider Charlotte. Since this character is supposed to be female, George's teacher doesn't allow George to play Charlotte. This makes George upset and leads to George trying to come to terms with her gender identity and thus coming out to her family and classmates.
Ultimately, this book is about George who wants to become Melissa.
MY OPINION
There is not much text on each page of the book, wherefore it is an extremely quick read and feels a lot like a children's book:
WHY SPIDERS? Why couldn't it be follow the butterflies?
My main problem with this book was the constant mentioning of spiders. Since I absolutely hate and despise spiders and am also extremely scared of and disgusted by them, that fact just completely ruined the book for me.
I wish that books that focused on spiders as much as this book did had a sticker on the cover that warned the reader thereof.
I find it unfair, that the back of the book never once mentions that this Charlotte that George wants to play, is actually a spider. 'So what?' you might think, 'if it is a spider, it's not really about that.' Well, I thought and hoped that too when the fact that Charlotte is a spider first came up. But it is actually stressed throughout the whole book that Charlotte is a spider, so that I couldn't read past it or try to ignore it.
I could absolutely not understand how anyone could want to play a spider.
Since a spider is also neither a boy nor a girl, I would have found it much more logical for the plot of this book to have picked a play with a princess in the leading role instead of a spider who is only made female through her female name. The only good factor about this whole "I want to play a spider"-drama was, that George mainly wanted to be Charlotte because of her kindness and smartness. And still, George always enjoyed to "fly around like a spider", which made it quite hard for me to focus on the positive aspects of said spider.
There was one scene in this book in which George's "enemy" mocked the spider Charlotte and said that he would step on her if he met her, which made George so mad. I, on the other hand, never related more to this book than in this scene to that guy who wanted to step on a spider.
I really tried to see past the spiders, tried to warm up to the book and to George every while that no spider was mentioned... but when tarantulas got mentioned in the last chapter of the book, the book had just completely lost me and another star in its already low rating.
I just don't want to read about spiders, thank you very much.
Now you may argue 'What about Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings, who both have spiders in their books?' Yes, they do. But these books aren't only a few pages long and don't have their main focus on a spider.
Enforcing stereotypical gender roles
George had some girl magazines hidden away, which sort of where her guilty pleasure. I was glad that these were magazines instead of dresses, which unfortunately get mostly used in transgender stories. Sadly, George also had this weird obsession with everything "typically girly", like skirts and the colour pink, and makeup and so on. I am very critical of that approach, because all of these things are only stereotypically "girly" and only seen as female because the society teaches everyone to see them as such. But there are a lot of girls who don't enjoy wearing skirts, don't like the colour pink and don't like wearing makeup and who still feel and identify as girls. These things don't define being a girl.
Of course the problem actually lies in our society who creates those gender roles and who puts a gender on a piece of fabric or on a colour or on certain behaviour. But I felt like this book enforced those stereotypes by clearly separating what is girlish and what is boyish and by drawing a clear line between the genders.
Since I am a feminist and against strict gender roles, all of this felt quite problematic to me. Especially, concerning that this is a children's book, which means that this book enforces gender roles and stereotypes into young kids' heads, which I just cannot support.
I also found it problematic that girl magazines - who are in itself problematic since there is no male counterpart to them - got used to stress what being a girl means.
Unlikeable, selfish main character George
I never really liked George. I absolutely adored Kelly, George's best friend, because she was such an understanding and selfless friend to George and George didn't deserve her at all. Kelly was insanely supportive of George right from the start and all the way throughout the book, but George acted incredibly selfish all the time and always had to be the centre of attention.
When Kelly got the part that George wanted, George got mad at Kelly and then Kelly acted so selfless in her further actions and George wasn't even thankful therefore but rather acted as if that was George's right because Kelly couldn't even act well - as George didn't get tired of mentioning directly in Kelly's face.
It always had to be about George and George even got annoyed by Kelly mentioning her dad too often and kept reminding Kelly that her dad was weird, which I found so unnecessary and hurtful towards Kelly. But George wouldn't have even thought about Kelly's feelings, only about not having to hear too much about anyone else but herself. And Kelly nevertheless was so amazing to George, wherefore George neve gave her any credit, which made George extremely rude in my eyes.
And I feel like this is sort of outrageous to say, since George is a trans girl, but being trans doesn't excuse this behaviour.
George actually never grew on me, since her obsession with everything "typically girly" was so annoyingly stereotypical in my opinion and I just couldn't get it.
Other stuff that annoyed me
I found the teacher's and George's mum's reactions to George wanting to play a spider to be ridiculously wrong and absurd and couldn't understand them. The only female thing about that spider was her name, the spider costume was completely black, so there was nothing "typically girly" about her. Again, all of this would have made more sense if the author had chosen a princess or something "typically girly" as the main part instead of a spider.
It was both annoying and unrealistic that everyone seemed to stress all the time that George was a boy and that George would turn out to be a man. I know that gender, unfortunately, plays a great role in our society, but the problem here was that this book didn't criticise that fact but rather wanted it to be only reversed: everyone should stress that George was a girl; and everytime someone called George something girlish, George beamed.
George's idea of what it means to be a girl felt so biased.
For example, when the class should tell others their favourite colour, George thinks "pink because then everyone would know I'm a girl." I basically just gave up at that point. How much more could you enforce gender stereotypes?
CONCLUSION
To sum it up quite quickly: A spider plays a prominent role in this book and I hate spiders so I hated that fact. And this book enforces gender stereotypes all the times, which annoyed the heck out of me because I just cannot support this.
George was also a selfish and unlikeable protagonist that never grew on me.
As you probably have guessed by now, I was extremely disappointed by that book, since I only heard amazing reviews of it before.
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