Girl Meets Boy [Paperback]

“The great thing about stories is that they can build their own walls and then let us walk right through them. Girl Meets Boy is a joyful celebration of life in all its strange shapes, on all sides of the wall.” –Jeanette Winterson, The Times

“A spritely love story that plays on notions of gender and sexuality to exuberant effect.” –The Observer

“Smith has done a splendid job. Alongside the touching love story are some perceptive insights on the ambiguities of gender. As fanciful as it is honest and as moving as it is hilarious, this is a gorgeous story.” –The London Paper

“An ecstatic, exhilarating helter-skelter ride of a story which shows just how relevant Ovid’s myth of the transformative power of love is to modern readers . . . [Smith's] Midge and Anthea are jean-clad demonstrations that myths aren’t about exotic gods but human experience.” –Financial Times

“It is clever, complex and thrilling . . . Girl Meets Boy delights because it refuses to stop at a single metamorphosis; despite its compactness, its stories multiply and rebound exuberantly, its echoes calling to one another across the pages.” –The Times Literary Supplement (TLS)

“Ali Smith bursts from the page with her fabulous retelling of the story of Iphis and Ianthe from Ovid's Metamorphoses. Girl Meets Boy . . . pulls you in and doesn't let you go. . . . Smith's retelling is bold and brilliant–containing the best sex I've read in years.” –One of Jackie Kay’s favourite books of 2007, The Observer

“From its arresting opening line to its exuberant ending, Girl Meets Boy is concerned with gender, love and transformation.” –London Review of Books

“A cheerful, sexy, disorienting take on the gender-shifting myths of Iphis . . . Smith’s spare and sharp lyricism . . . are handled with glee . . . and Smith’s cadences, which read like classical drama, carry the novel along beautifully.”  –Publishers Weekly

“Ali Smith’s Girl Meets Boy might give you the inspiration you need to seek out love . . . [A] compact, rollicking novel . . . In Smith’s hands, Ovid’s gender-bending metamorphosis story gets a Madison Avenue-style makeover. –The San Diego Union-Tribune

“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.” –Scottish Arts Council

“[Smith] shows us unfamiliar beauty within the mundane, as if we were children again. . . . In prose marked by harmonious opposites, she’s childlike and wise, exuberant and subtle, humorously intelligent and provocatively dry.”–The Globe and Mail

“[A] witty, profound, humane paean to passionate love. . . . Highly original, audacious and lyrical, she has become a special writer.” –The Sunday Herald

“To read Ali Smith is like being borne up on the wing of a bird in flight.” –The Globe and Mail

“Ovid could hardly be a better fit for Smith’s ethereal and transformative imagination.” –Daily Telegraph

“By the time I finished the book, my heart was beating and tears stood in my eyes, even as I had the biggest smile written all over my face.” – The Observer


From the Hardcover edition.

Another internationally acclaimed writer contributes a fascinating, compelling reinterpretation of a myth that resonates deeply today.

Ligdus and Telethusa are having a child, but they cannot afford to have a girl. Ligdus informs Telethusa that she had better hope for a boy. While this decision makes them both sad, Telethusa “must/obey.” She prays to Isis, but births a girl and names her Iphis, a name that “suited male or female–/a neutral name.” She convinces everyone, including Ligdus, that Iphis is a boy.

Iphis matures and falls in love with another girl, Ianthe, and is engaged for marriage, yet s/he is ruled by the sexual norms of the time: “[P]ossessed by love so strange . . . no female wants/a female!” but “no learned art–can ever make of me/a boy.” She attempts to reconcile her love for Ianthe against the pressures of “nature.” The wedding day is near, Telethusa is desperate, and prays again to Isis. Iphis is transformed, looking like a boy.

Is Ovid suggesting that what we think is nature is attitude? Does Iphis grow a penis? Or does Iphis, adopting the characteristics of a boy, remain a girl married to a girl, undermining traditional values?


From the Hardcover edition.