An elite, female, teen baseball player explores conventional female sex roles as she sadly realizes that her male BFF will never fall in love with her.
Charlie is an eighteen-year-old senior approaching the end of the school year. She has been raised by her widowed father since her mother died when she was six. Her dad is a wealthy, former Major League pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates, who now works as a broadcaster for the Pirates. He owns a sprawling mansion in Pittsburgh, complete with a pool, a full-sized baseball diamond, a batting cage, and even a home theater. He has practically co-parented Eric, the only child of two wealthy attorneys who live nearby and have little time for him. Since they were four years old, Charlie and Eric have trained together with her father, who has coached Eric as a pitcher and Charlie as a catcher and batter.
Charlie and Eric have always been platonic BFFs. They have spent the last four years on the varsity baseball team, along with two of Eric’s close friends, Kevin and Diego. The three boys constantly hang out at Charlie’s house. For years, Charlie’s father has bought two of the best Pirates season tickets, directly behind home plate, and Charlie rotates taking one of the boys to every home game. Despite being proudly endowed with double-D breasts, Charlie has always dressed and acted like her male friends. She has never had a single female friend, and as a shy introvert, she has been fine with that, although her extroverted dad has long hoped she would expand her social circle so he could throw big parties for her at their mansion.
The inciting incident arrives when Eric announces he has asked a beautiful girl to their senior prom. Kevin and Diego have also lined up dates, and they plan to share a limo. It does not even cross their minds to ask Charlie if she might want to go, too. When she brings it up, the three boys burst into raucous laughter at the very idea of Charlie wearing a fancy dress and dancing at prom. This hits Charlie hard and launches a full-on identity crisis. After a lifetime of being “one of the boys,” she starts to wonder if she has missed out on being a girl and having female friends.
What struck me most, which was almost certainly not intended by this religiously conservative author, is how eerily Charlie’s arc mirrors the journey of a trans woman. Charlie’s main struggle is not only pining for her BFF, but also coming to terms with her gender identity. In the most literal sense, the climax of the book involves Charlie “coming out of the closet” to Eric to confess she is, in fact, a girl.
The book’s portrayal of femininity is oddly retrograde, yet not exactly conservative, since it revolves around hedonistic material consumption and outward display. Being a “girl” in this story involves wearing tight shirts and short skirts, getting blonde highlights and mani-pedis, wearing makeup, learning to giggle and dance at a cheerleader sleepover, and treating boys as alien creatures to be both mocked and enticed. Meanwhile, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, America’s unisex uniform for the last sixty years, brands Charlie as a “tomboy,” a pseudo-boy.
I did genuinely enjoy some parts of this novel. It is rare in YA fiction to find a parent who is wonderfully supportive, rather than a cliché neglectful or cruel antagonist. It is also excellent that her father insists that Charlie and Eric consume a healthy diet geared toward optimal athletic performance, and utilizes his personal chef to prepare all of their meals up to that standard.
I loved that Charlie is a spectacular athlete, but I was annoyed by the implication that elite athleticism is somehow not “feminine.”
I liked Charlie’s love interest, Jace, a delightfully metrosexual Cinnamon Roll with three sisters, but he serves more as Charlie’s mentor and therapist through her gender identity confusion than as an actual swoony boyfriend.
I appreciated it that this book avoids a romance trope I am not fond of, “friends to lovers.” It virtually always relies on the contrived angst of a passive FMC, who is afraid to confess her feelings because, “What if I lose my friend?” However, what replaces it quickly devolves into Charlie's being just as passive. She frets the entire novel that Eric will never accept her as a girl because he prefers her as a convenient, androgynous buddy. His selfish attitude made me strongly dislike Eric and feel constantly frustrated with Charlie. And when they finally talk it out at the very end of the novel, their mutual attitude adjustment comes far too easily.
Finally, I think it was a major mistake to include a reference to Charlie’s having very large breasts. It is utterly unrealistic that any teenage boy would regard a girl with that type of figure as a boy. Any straight, hormone-addled teenage boy would inevitably feel sexually attracted to a voluptuous girl. It does not matter that Charlie has always worn loose T-shirts. There is no way they could hide the size of her bosom. A baseball uniform certainly would not, since it consists of a close-fitting shirt tucked into tight pants. She would be getting embarrassing catcalls from the opposing team, and very likely while walking the halls of her high school. In addition, girls who are that well endowed require special bras for adequate support, even if they are not athletes, but especially if they are active in sports. Also, standard catcher's chest protectors for female softball players (which is what would be readily available) are made for a modest bust. Someone with Charlie’s figure would need customized gear to safely play catcher. But the novel never hints at any of these obvious concerns. My attitude is, don’t bring up a sensitive topic in a YA novel if you are not willing to deal with it adequately. It is particularly obnoxious to be this careless in a book with pretensions to being G-rated.