Mick & Michelle by Nina Rossing

My Rating: 2 Stars

Publisher: Harmony Ink Press

Publish Date: October 31st, 2017

Received: Netgalley provided an e-arc in exchange for an honest review

Purchase: Amazon

Synopsis:

Fifteen-year-old Mick Mullins has a great life: his parents are sweet, his sister is tolerable, and his friendships are solid. But as summer descends on Queens, he prepares to turn his carefree existence upside down by disclosing a secret he has kept long enough. It’s time to work up the courage to reveal that he is not a boy, but a girl—and that her name is Michelle. Having always been the perfect, good boy, Michelle is terrified that the complicated truth will disappoint, hurt, or push away the people closest to her. She can’t continue hiding for much longer, though, because her body is turning into that of a man’s, and she is desperate to stop the development—desperate enough to consider self-medicating with hormones.

Most of all, Michelle fears that Grandpa, who is in a nursing home after a near fatal stroke, won’t survive the shock if he finds out that his favorite grandchild, and the only boy, is a girl. If she kills her beloved Grandpa by leaving Mick behind, she isn’t sure embracing her real identity will be worth the loss.

Opening Sentence: “I SPOT a cute guy, third one today, by the newsstand.”

Musings:

I really, really, really wanted to love this book. I wanted to be happy to see another book representing lgbt community in a great way, but that isn’t really what I got with Mick & Michelle.

Why I didn’t really like this book:

The writing in this novel felt off.

The writing itself felt disjointed from what a realistic situation would have been like. No matter what the author tried to do to make this feel authentic for me, I just couldn’t see it, because every so often a character would say or do something that seemed pretty off to me and I couldn’t get into the story.

Weird Situations.

There is a part in this novel where a guy catcalls a girl in the street and Mick (truly Michelle) wishes she would one day be catcalled… which paired with the guy (who originally catcalled) basically telling Michelle that girls feel good and enjoy being catcalled because they feel wanted came off as extremely disturbing. This situation and many others made this book a very uncomfortable book to read.

Redeeming Qualities:

The ending was kinda cute.

I liked the ending a bit. If anything it was my favorite part of this novel.

Imperfect Humans:

So while a lot of this story didn’t really make sense to me, the one thing that did make sense was that in the end this story was an imperfect one about imperfect people and while I may not have enjoyed it in the way I wanted to and that’s ok. All human experience is different and even though parts of Michelle’s journey didn’t ring true for me, they could ring true for you.

Thanks for reading! Let me know your thoughts down in the comments.

-Till next time!