Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I found this book insufferable. It's like a literary equivalent of Robin Williams' or Will Smith's worst movies (e.g. Patch Adams, Bicentennial Man, Legend of Baggar Vance) where it strives so hard to be profound while trying so hard to be charming. If you like those movies I think this book will be right up your alley. - The writing style is infuriating. Here's ONE sentence as an example: "Alone on their farm, Rosie and Penn had forgotten all about the way your neighbors' desire to live next to a mown lawn and weeded parking strip somehow trumped yours to not care and go to yoga instead of gardening on Saturday mornings, the way their kids lay out on towels in the backyard and played bad music loudly so there was nothing you could do to stop it entering your open windows and then your open ears, the way your own horde of children holding a science experiment to determine how loud you had to yell to shatter a wineglass meant you had to worry about more than the wineglass." "The whole book is like that. If you like Gilmore Girls I guess this might be appealing to you, but to me it's overly cutesy writing that screams for an editor. - This book clearly has a message, but I think the message would have been much stronger had the story been told from the perspective of the kid who was actually experiencing gender dysphoria. This is a book primarily from the perspective of the parents. As such, it comes off as didactic, transparent, and tedious to read. - The characters are cartoons. With the constant witty banter, the dialogue is written as if they're TV show characters rather than actual people. Nobody talks like this. It beggars belief that someone like Mr. Tongo could ever exist. It's clear that his over-the-top personality is meant to mask the fact that his role is completely functional. - The detour into Thailand is offensive. Aside from the trip not making any sense whatsoever, it's transparent as a device to pound enlightenment into us. This is most apparent in the dialogue between Rosie and K. I'm also not thrilled to see yet again another Last Samurai or Dances with Wolves situation. Where it's the white person who comes to live among the locals and finds them wise and mystical, leaving more open-minded than before. It's not the caricature that's offensive, it's how unoriginal it is. The ending might be the worst part. Hard to even believe how on-the-nose and cheesy it is. This is the stuff of young adult novels. I really hated this book.