It’s the concept of “failing” that feels so poignant. His experiences at school, combined with the fact that homosexuality wasn’t decriminalised until Boyne was in his third year of university and that, by that time, the Aids crisis was in full spate, feel like so much to contend with that self-reproach is simply too cruel. In other parts of his life, after all, Boyne seems like a measure of success: not only in career terms, but in his closeness to family and friends and in his enjoyment of his daily life. “I’m not spending all my day crying about it,” he reassures me. “I work hard. And I like my life a lot. And maybe you just can’t have everything.”

You were right on trans issues, author tells Father Ted

I don’t consider myself a cis man; I consider myself a man,” he wrote. “For while I will happily employ any term that a person feels best defines them, whether that be transgender, nonbinary or gender fluid, to name but a few, I reject the notion that someone can force an unwanted term on to another.” He also touched on the wider trans debate as it has played out on social media and wrote that he rejected the term “cis”, which refers to when a person’s gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth.Putting aside the book’s representation of trans issues for a moment (yes, we will get to it), even just in terms of Jessica as a story, there is very little that I found I could enjoy. Pretty much all of the characters are awful, and I even found it difficult to root for Jessica, for reasons that we’ll get to in a minute. I’m not saying, by the way, that Boyne should have written the story differently. As with the awful ITV drama, Butterflies, which aired last year, I’m saying the story shouldn’t have been written at all. The protagonist, Sam, is a 13 year old boy whose parents both work high up in the British government. He doesn’t have a lot of friends and is teased for being dyslexic. His brother, Jason, has adored him since day dot, is the captain of the football/soccer team, is very popular, and the reason why Sam is only teased and not bullied.

My Brother’s Name is Jessica – Book Review – Spoilers My Brother’s Name is Jessica – Book Review – Spoilers

As I discuss the book, I will alternate between Jason and Jessica, and changing pronouns. I do this to maintain coherency with the book. Sam tells the story as though it is happening as it happens. Jason/Jessica’s gender changes depending on what is happening, so with their aunt they’re Jessica (she/her), but with the rest of the family, they’re Jason (he/him) until the final scenes of the book. I quite liked reading the books written for their age groups before passing them on to one or other of them, as long as it was a good story that was well-written with believable characters and I didn’t have to constantly remind myself that whatever I was reading was written for youngsters, as I did with John Boyne’s latest offering . Although according to this interview, he claims not to write with a particular audience in mind, that just doesn’t ring true with this book which, of course, I only bought because people were calling for it to be boycotted. If there hadn’t been a fuss made about it, it wouldn’t have been on my radar and how depressing it is that the would-be censors of today have learned nothing from the past. In short, this book is not Jessica’s. It doesn’t belong to her. It’s about everyone else but her. And when you look at it like that, it’s not hard to see why the trans community has refused to embrace it as theirs.

As a cisgender person, while I do my best to be an ally to my trans siblings, I am aware that my experiences mean I have a bias, and like many cispeople (such as the publishers/editors of this book), I missed a lot of transphobia in the book.