Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith (2007): A Review
Author: Ali Smith
Publication Year: 2007
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐💫
Pages: 164
Source: book
Genre: literary fiction, queer, retelling of myth
Awards: James Tiptree Jr. Award Nominee (2008)
Ali Smith’s Girl Meets Boy (2007) is a little different from her other works, mostly because it does not require a diagram, a therapist, and three separate timelines to understand what is happening. The time, narration, and events are relatively straightforward, and the ending has the distinct air of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: everyone is floating toward harmony, transformation, and communal joy. Suspicious behavior, frankly.
Because of that—and because it contains a little too much romance for my emotionally bankrupt literary taste—I am not a huge fan of this very small book. Apparently, what I want from literature is misery, confusion, trauma, grief, existential dread, and at least one narrative structure that makes me question my own eyesight. Happiness? Resolution? Love? No, thank you. This is clearly a ME problem.
Its shortness, however, is excellent. Five stars for brevity. We respect a book that knows when to leave the room.
Like Smith’s other works, Girl Meets Boy also comes with a loud, unapologetic political conscience. The novel insists that water is a fundamental human right rather than a corporate commodity—which, hopefully, is not a controversial position unless you are a cartoon villain in a suit. Alongside this, Smith gives us her usual thematic buffet: fluid identity and gender, non-conformity, capitalism as a cursed swamp creature, corporations as monsters, surveillance capitalism, and playing with language and words.
My favorite part, though, is the mythic framework. Smith retells—or perhaps more accurately reimagines—Ovid’s myth of Iphis and Ianthe, and the novel was originally commissioned as part of a series rewriting ancient mythology. I am an easy target for myth retellings. I see “reimagining of ancient myth” and immediately become emotionally available. Add parody, and I will hand over a star on principle. Sadly, this one is not really a parody, so I cannot fully activate my myth-retelling gremlin mode.
Who are we dealing with here? Two sisters: Anthea and Imogen. I loved the conflict and tension between them, and honestly, the not-quite-main character Imogen stole the show for me. Her reactions are hilarious, her panic is just so good, and her character development—or should we say her metamorphosis, because Ovid is watching—is one of the best parts of the book.
Ultimately, I am giving Girl Meets Boy 3.5 out of 5 stars. It is clever, political, mythic, playful, and full of Smith’s linguistic sparkle. But the neat wish-fulfillment of the final pages lacks the sharp, painful edges I usually love in her more complex novels. It resolves into something too harmonious, too bright, too almost-romantic. In other words, it is a small, weird love story, and I, tragically, seem to prefer my fiction served with emotional damage and a side of narrative confusion.
TELL ME: how do you feel about happy endings in literary fiction? Do you enjoy a story that resolves into a beautiful, mythic “all together now” dream, or do you prefer the messy, un-redacted weight of open-ended realism? And where do you stand on Ali Smith’s style: brilliant, exhausting, magical, chaotic, or all of the above?
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