Ali Smith

Girl meets boy. It's a story as old as time. But what happens when an old story meets a brand new set of circumstances? Ali Smith's remix of Ovid's most joyful metamorphosis is a story about the kind of fluidity that can't be bottled and sold. It is about girls and boys, girls and girls, love and transformation, a story of puns and doubles, reversals and revelations. Funny and fresh, poetic and political, here is a tale of change for the modern world.

Girl Meets Boy

Girl meets boy. It's a story as old as time. But in Whitbread winner Ali Smith's lyrical, funny, mash-up of Ovid's most joyful gender-bending metamorphosis story, girl meets boy in so many more ways than one.

The Myth of Iphis

cedar winslow

I wondered if everything I saw, if maybe every landscape we casually glanced at, was the outcome of an ecstasy we didn't even know was happening, a love-act moving at a speed slow and steady enough for us to be deceived into thinking it was just everyday reality. 

I had not known, before us, that every vein in my body was capable of carrying light… I had not really known I could be so much more than myself. I had not known another body could do this to mind. 

i’ve been here!!! i love the phrase “a church for books”

The second-hand bookshop used to be a church. Now it was a church for books. 

Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity... rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time. - Judith Butler

Girl meets boy. It's a story as old as time. But what happens when an old story meets a brand new set of circumstances? Ali Smith's re-mix of Ovid's most joyful metamorphosis is a story about the kind of fluidity that can't be bottled and sold. It is about girls and boys, girls and girls, love and transformation, a story of puns and doubles, reversals and revelations. Funny and fresh, poetic and political, Girl meets boy is a myth of metamorphosis for the modern world.

blake

Because of us, things came together. Everything was possible. 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 really known I could be so much more than myself. I had not known another body could do this to mine.

I wished I was old. I was tired of being so young, so stupidly knowing, so stupidly forgetful. I was tired of having to be anything at all. I felt like the Internet, full of every kind of information but none of it mattering more than any of it, and all of its little links like thin white roots on a broken plant dug out of the soil, lying drying on its side. 

Kendall McClain

I consider this book perfect! The portrayal of gender and sexuality is so interesting and I love that the title kinda tricks you into thinking it’s a traditional straight romance. The writing style is also hypnotic and I love her so much

Disappointing but still enjoyable read. The concept behind the novel was the highlight, along with the setting of Inverness and Crete (two places I have been and loved!!). There were some lyrical passages that I enjoyed, but I found myself consistently in disbelief of the actions, conversations, and sentences of this book. I expected the book to make me think, but the plot was resolved in such an unconflicted manner that it left me with nothing to chew on. 

Ana Hein

I really really liked the book. A lot. The prose was experimental and the rhetoric thought-provoking. There were some exceptionally beautiful passages that soaked the page and was golden and alive. However, my one niggle with the book, and this massively influenced my rating, was the blurb. The book sells itself as a retelling of Ovid's Metamorphoses. As a book about light and dark and change and identity and magic. And whilst there are certainly elements of these it didn't feel a modern Ovid. It was its own thing. Wonderfully, inventively, politically it's own work of fiction - certainly with strong intertextuality. But it also felt to me to reference Shakespeare, Angela Carter, Virginia Woolf. 

I thought the book massively sold itself short and marketed itself as something it wasn't - meaning that for the first few chapters I was confused and bored. It almost struck me as something Ali Smith had written earlier which was later co-opted by the publishers into a series of modern myths to capitalise on the current market.

To summarise. A good book but nothing like what I expected. 

hat carter

I really really liked the book. A lot. The prose was experimental and the rhetoric thought-provoking. There were some exceptionally beautiful passages that soaked the page and was golden and alive. However, my one niggle with the book, and this massively influenced my rating, was the blurb. The book sells itself as a retelling of Ovid's Metamorphoses. As a book about light and dark and change and identity and magic. And whilst there are certainly elements of these it didn't feel a modern Ovid. It was its own thing. Wonderfully, inventively, politically it's own work of fiction - certainly with strong intertextuality. But it also felt to me to reference Shakespeare, Angela Carter, Virginia Woolf. 

I thought the book massively sold itself short and marketed itself as something it wasn't - meaning that for the first few chapters I was confused and bored. It almost struck me as something Ali Smith had written earlier which was later co-opted by the publishers into a series of modern myths to capitalise on the current market.

To summarise. A good book but nothing like what I expected. 

Megan Paterson

I might be bias because I love a story based in Inverness but this story was incredible. An amazing look into words and our understanding of their meaning through society and deeper, a look into gender and relationships and love. Smith writes like a dream.

amy 

Laia Feliu

Marek R

Karen E

Melanie Knight

A STUNNING RETELLING BY THE AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR ALI SMITH'Joyful' JEANETTE WINTERSON'Pulls you in and doesn't let you go . . . bold and brilliant' JACKIE KAY'A glorious wide-awake dream of a book . . . By the time I finished, my heart was beating and tears stood in my eyes, even as I had the biggest smile written all over my face' KIRSTY GUNNGirl meets boy. It's a story as old as time. But what happens when an old story meets a brand new set of circumstances? Ali Smith's re-mix of Ovid's most joyful metamorphosis is a story about the kind of fluidity that can't be bottled and sold. It is about girls and boys, girls and girls, love and transformation, a story of puns and doubles, reversals and revelations. Funny and fresh, poetic and political, here is a tale of change for the modern world.

cher elle

heleen de boever

Caitlin Bohannon

Isobel 

Aline Peeters

Sydney Henry

Lili Vanden Wijngaert

Amber C

Sabine Delorme

Working with her sister, Imogen, at a Scottish bottled-water business, Anthea, flighty and bored with the corporate environment, falls for a protest artist nicknamed Iphisol, in a funny, lyrical adaptation of Ovid's gender-bending retelling of the myth of Iphis. By the author of the Whitbread Prize-winning author of The Accidental.

Girl Meets Boy

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