Title Girl Meets boy Series Canongate Mythology Author Ali Smith Cover Art --- (covered by a sticker) Publisher Alfred A. Knopf - 2007 First Printing Canongate Books - 2007 Category Mythology Warnings Homosexuality Main Characters Imogen, Anthea, Robin Main Elements Myth Retelling

Girl meets boy. It's a story as old as time. But what happens when the old story meets a brand new set of circumstances?

Ali Smith's re-mix of Ovids most joyful metamorphosis is s story about the kind of fluidity that can't be bottled and sold.

It's 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.

I almost didn't write up a review of this one. The Canongate series ranges from absolutely amazing to boring as dirt. While this one wasn't exactly boring, the connection to mythology was so tenuous I didn't see it at all except in a couple pages where the story of Iphis and Ianthe. Iphis was a born a girl, and her mother wanting to protect her raised her as a boy, which caused certain issues when it was time to get married and the tale ends with the gods turning Iphis into a man so he could marry his love.

Other than those two pages (where on the positive side I learned a myth I hadn't come across before), is just a tale about a girl falling in love with another girl and her thoughts about it, and then the POV of her sister dealing with the knowledge that her sister is gay. It's written in a quirky style which kept my interest a little bit, but overall the amout of fantasy was non-existent, the "re-telling" itself is not a great fit since Iphis is turned into a boy but here remains a girl which of course tells a different kind of story. It isn't the worst of the collection but I just felt there wasn't enough myth.