Growing up, I was known as a “girlie girl,” not because I was particularly feminine or into boys or wearing dresses. It mostly had to do with my shyness, timidness, and, dare I say, wimpiness.
I didn’t like this label. It felt like someone was putting me in a box and deciding what I was like before I ever had a chance to figure that out for myself.
So, despite my inability to stand up for myself, I set out to prove myself, and I’m still doing that to this day. Because, sadly, it’s flattering for girls to be recognized for excelling at “boy things.”
I never wanted to be a boy. I just wanted to be taken seriously and to have a mixture of traditionally gender-assigned activities under my belt with no questions asked.
North of Tomboy is the perfect companion piece to these back and forth feelings that even the girliest of girls tend to have throughout their lives. We’re made fun of whether our interests are traditional or fight against the norm. But the protagonist of this middle grade novel refuses to back down, despite the pushback from her family, society, and the era in which she is growing up.
Below is my review of North of Tomboy followed by an interview with its author, Julie A. Swanson.
North of Tomboy plot summary
Set between the winter of 1972 and the fall of 1973, North of Tomboy follows Jess Jezowski, one of the middle children of a large, Polish family who live in rural Michigan. She spends most of her days proving to others that she is part boy. She wants to look like a boy and do boy things. Instead, her mother insists on dressing her up, won’t let her cut her hair, and gets her a doll for Christmas.
Instead of rebelling over her girlie present as usual, Jess instead chops off the doll’s hair, sews some boy clothes for it, and names it Mickey. Her shyness melts away as she effortlessly develops a witty, strong-willed voice for Mickey and begins to take him around, making him talk for her and surprising herself and her family with the things that come out of his (her) mouth.
Mickey is not only a source of entertainment, but he’s also the only one who can calm her father down when he loses his temper, which is frequently and creates a lot of tension in their otherwise loving household. Jess’ mother appears to know how to calm him down, but it comes at the expense of her own self-respect.
As Jess navigates the year, the changing seasons, and the challenges of being a 9-year-old girl who doesn’t get to be herself, she finds that she leans too much on Mickey to speak for her. And as she matures, she begins to speak for herself, to her great advantage.
The story
North of Tomboy is such a well-told novel that blends childhood innocence with very serious themes and situations. It is first and foremost a story about a family and the ways in which their family dynamics work and don’t work, just as with any family.
The chapters are split into diary-like entries, each with its own separate conflicts and resolutions that seamlessly tie together throughout the story. Each tale tends to center around a season or holiday which brings about new conflicts and resolutions.
Jess is constantly fighting to be considered one of the guys. Yet she is always being discounted by both the males and females in her family as well as her friends, teachers, and community in general.
Being a family story, the tone is a mixed bag of comedy, drama, and action. Swanson writes such natural and witty dialogue, giving each character a distinct voice and personality and really pulling out all of the stops for Mickey who comes complete with his own accent, word choice, and pacing.
The characters
As for the characters not trapped inside of a doll’s body, there is such an interesting mix of personalities in the Jezowski household and those connected to them. From a father with a short fuse to a mother with superhuman patience and ego, Jess’ feminist teacher, and the nosy neighbor, Eunice, who spreads rumors about Jess’ “game” with Mickey, it’s a melting pot of characters which presents itself as many iterations of love, friction, compromise, and frustration.
Jess herself is such a deep thinker. She’s torn between doing what’s expected of her and doing what she wants, and she goes down rabbit holes of inner monologues related to her struggles. Her strong religious beliefs also challenge her urge to live authentically, and she spends a good deal rationalizing her viewpoint as not sinful and begins to believe it as the story goes on.
I love this quote where Jess surmises, “Girls have to grin and bear it, boys don’t. It isn’t fair. Someday I’m going to change that. When I’m big, I’ll wear what I want and get my hair cut, and nobody’ll be able to tell me I can’t. Because people might look at me and think I’m weak, but I’m not. I’m strong. I know I am. I feel it.”
The message
The story doesn’t wrap up in a neat little bow at the end. Everyone is who they are, and they all still have a lot of work to do on themselves and others. But it’s Jess who has the biggest breakthrough and is ultimately rewarded for it in the end. I know this isn’t always the outcome that people earn when they stand up for themselves, but it’s an encouraging message, particularly since this story is primarily aimed at a younger audience.
I love how this story doesn’t force feed any particular message or try to sugarcoat hard decisions. It gives you flawed characters to love, hate, and ultimately root for, and the reader takes from it what they will.
My recommendation
I recommend North of Tomboy to anyone looking for a great middle grade novel that can be read by both kids and adults in a To Kill A Mockingbird style that blends the simplicity of its surface-level storytelling with a depth of themes, philosophies, and reflections lurking between the lines of each pages. The story is longer than what I typically choose to read and review, but the premise was so compelling that I gave it a chance, and I’m glad I did.
Part of the length can be attributed to the drawings related to the story or particular scene scattered throughout the novel, giving it a classic E.B. White feel to it that I wish more authors would utilize. But they are merely a supplement to an already strong story with great characters and a topical story that stays true to its time period and doesn’t rely on buzzwords or any tired language to make its fresh and clear points.
My rating
An interview with Julie A. Swanson
You wrote in your author bio that writing the book was difficult. What was the most challenging part of writing this book?
Cutting the story back to a length editors and agents wouldn’t roll their eyes over was the most challenging. After decades working on it and getting to know it, I felt the story needed to be a longer one.
On top of that, I tend to over-write. So it was painful to get it to a manageable word count. Even once I’d cut all I felt I could, people would say it was still too long for MG, which is why I ended up deciding to go with a hybrid publisher.
SparkPress was willing to accept it if I got it under 100,000 words (it’s 92,000). I’ve been paranoid about its length, about what reviewers and book buyers might say about it, but a few years ago I started compiling a list of MG books I’d read and their lengths, and I saw this trend for increasingly long MG books. And in the past few months, going into bookstores, I’ve been surprised to see how thick the books on the MG shelves are!
My book doesn’t look too long at all compared to them. And no one who has reviewed it has mentioned its length, so phew.
The most fun?
Mickey was the most fun, remembering things he actually said or trying to come up with thing that he’d say, the way he’d say them.
Did you plot out the story in advance or just write as you went?
I tend to just write and get it all out at first, everything I want to be in a story. I knew how I wanted this story to go for the most part, but I’m not good at outlining or plotting out stories according to some structure like the Hero’s Journey or Save the Cat where you have three acts and certain plot points. My brain’s just not that organized, doesn’t like working that way.
But I’m not totally a “pantser”–I have my own loose plot in my head. I write like a patchwork quilter; I know what the big patches are and the order most of them go in, and I write those patches first, but then I have the hard part left to do, going back and connecting patches, creating transitions between them, making things flow in a cause-and-effect way.
I do look to various methods of plotting to guide me at that point. The book The Virgin’s Promise, by Kim Hudson, was very helpful to me because it’s a way to plot a more “feminine” storyline (which ironically, my stories tend to have!)–the Hero’s Journey is more for stories about the main character going out and leaving home to save the kingdom, whereas the Virgin’s Journey more outlines how the Hero/Virgin stays home and changes the kingdom from within.
In either case, what did your typical writing sessions look like in terms of how often you wrote, how much you wrote, and where you wrote?
I write very consistently, sometimes many hours a day, seven days a week. But there are also times, like when we have company, or when I’m in Michigan visiting my family or elsewhere on a vacation, that I won’t write for a day or even days at a time.
When first starting out as a writer, I worried about how much and how often I wrote (our kids were little, and writing time was hard to come by), so I was hard on myself and forced myself to write whenever I could and very regularly, and I’d feel bad about it if I didn’t (as if I was going to lose self-discipline and end up quitting!), but after a number of years I saw that my dedication to writing wasn’t flagging, and that it was nothing to worry about if I missed a couple days or even weeks.
I forced myself to take even longer breaks from working on this story several times when I was frustrated and felt it was best to move on to write other stories while I let this one ferment in me more.
I knew I’d get back to writing it, that I very much wanted to (I’d be chomping at the bit to work on it). In general, I do tend to go a bit stir-crazy if I haven’t written in few days, or if I have things I want/need to accomplish writing-wise and can’t find the time to do it, but I can write just about anywhere, take my computer everywhere with me. My favorite place to write is at the kitchen table, however.
You mention that you felt similar to Jess as a tomboy who wanted her interests to be taken seriously. What were your favorite activities growing up, and what advice do you have for those assigned female at birth who might feel the same?
As I say in my author bio, I enjoyed exploring the great outdoors, building forts, playing pretend games, writing and illustrating poems and stories, woodworking, sports, art, and reading. I spent a lot of time outside, where we had the freedom to roam and do what we wanted to do.
We lived in a beautiful rural area where there was so much to explore and few limits as to where we could go. And I always felt like I could 100% be myself outside, out in the woods alone, that nature took me as I was.
I felt the same way playing sports, that it was OK to be “unladylike” and boyish, to be aggressive and strong and competitive. Sports were empowering for me, to be on a field or court where those things about me were celebrated and good rather than looked down upon as things I shouldn’t be.
My advice for those who might feel the same as Jess is this: Your gender isn’t as black-‘n-white as people might make it seem it is or should be. You don’t have to be a girl or a boy, either masculine or feminine. You can be both at the same time, in some ways masculine, in other ways feminine. Or you can be masculine sometimes, and feminine other times. You can also feel like neither.
You don’t have to find a label for yourself. And if you do, or have already, you can change your mind! Things aren’t set in stone, fixed and decided for all time. People often change. So be patient, don’t rush to a judgement on yourself, feel like you have to decide who or what you are at 10, 11, 12, or whatever age you might be. And don’t let anyone tell you what/who you are is wrong.
Don’t feel you have to be fake to be “right” (for them). Be right for you, be true to yourself. Be the way that makes you feel good inside. Every morning just wake up and be who you honestly feel you are that day.
If that changes, if you feel differently, if you one day know, that’s fine. But you don’t have to know and have a word for what you are either. You can just be your own kind of girl or boy, or neither or both. Just be your own weird indescribable but loveable you! A person, a human–a brave, growing, living, always changing YOU.
The voice that Jess uses for Mickey is very distinct. Was the voice based on anyone in particular?
Yes, that voice was based on the real Mickey. North of Tomboy is a semi-autobiographical, and I really did get a doll I turned into a boy, and I made him talk just like Mickey does in the story. Where Mickey’s voice came from, how I came up with that as a kid, I’m still not sure!
The book takes place in the early 70s, and there are a number of cultural events that come up throughout the story that are told in great detail. How did you research these moments to incorporate into the book, and is there anything in particular that stuck out in your research that you knew you had to add to the novel?
I lived through those events, so I remember hearing about them on the news and seeing articles about them in papers and magazines–the Vietnam war, POWs, Nixon, Watergate, Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. We really did watch the Battle of the Sexes as a family and followed the whole build-up to it. We watched President Nixon give speeches on TV.
But obviously as a kid I didn’t know or care about many of the details, didn’t ever really understand Watergate, so I had to research those things, make sure I knew what day they happened on, what the transcripts of Nixon’s speeches showed he actually said, so I could quote him verbatim. The Mother’s Day Massacre tennis match is an example of something that stuck out to me in my research that I knew had to add to the story; I can’t say I remember who Margaret Court was or that she played and lost to Bobby Riggs when he challenged her to play him, but when I read the bizarre hype name Bobby Riggs gave that match–The Mother’s Day Massacre–it was so colorful and vivid and funny to me, and it fit in well with my plot, so I put it in.
The intensity of Jess’ father’s outbursts are very realistic and impressively uncomfortable. What do you want readers to take from his behavior and the family’s response to his short fuse and forceful attempts to gain their forgiveness after he has them?
Two things:
First, people are complex, and no one is all bad or all good. Difficult people are the way they are for a reason or reasons
1.) How they’re naturally wired and came into this world.
2.) Life experiences that shaped them like their upbringing–and we would do well to try to understand them rather than just judge them.
We all have people in our families or among our friends who can be trying, and it’s possible to both love them dearly and be very angry/afraid/irritated with them at times. Try to understand and forgive them and to appreciate the good in them.
Secondly, when a parent is like this, it can have a huge impact on a child. Jess’s dad can also be sexist and take things out on her mom, and her mom’s response is to pacify and diffuse rather than possibly escalate his anger, which Jess sees as her mom being a doormat. The combination of those things, the family dynamics, contributes to Jess’s not wanting to identify as a girl, makes the idea of growing up to become a woman (and possibly being expected to be like her mom) very unappealing. She’s internalized all this and become a little misogynist, which she doesn’t realize, unfortunately. She interprets what she sees in her family and culture as “girls=bad/weak/trivial,” which, of course, isn’t true.
Do you have a favorite chapter in the book?
Hmm, it’s hard to pick just one. But I like Roxi’s Wedding a lot. Writing the first part of it where Jess is driving to the church with her dad and talking with him, I cried, which doesn’t happen to me often when I write.
I guess it was really cathartic for me, to write this scene where I talked to my dad about something I wish I had in real life as a kid. I like the rest of Roxi’s Wedding, too (all of it, except for the fact that I was a flower girl in my cousin’s wedding, is totally made-up), because it just feels so upbeat and victorious and empowering.
What/who do you think Jess grows up to be as an adult?
Other than saying she’s going to be a writer, I don’t want to answer that question because North of Tomboy is the first book in a series, and I don’t want to give things away. Even if North of Tomboy were a stand-alone title, I wouldn’t want to answer that; I very intentionally ended the story with Jess not knowing and still being confused and not entirely understanding her feelings (is it that she doesn’t like being a girl or that she wants to be a boy or that she really feels she is some combination of boy and girl, but mostly boy?).
Most of the stories I’ve read with LGBTQ themes and/or characters do show the main character having or coming to some clarity, or at least a decision as to “what they are,” which for me seems very unrealistic! I was still uncertain at 12, 14… even at 18. So, I wanted to put a story out there so readers who are like I was could see someone else who was living with the ambivalence, the ambiguity.
I think it’s important that kids know they don’t have to make a decision or glom onto a label before they’re certain, and that even once they think they’re certain, they might change their mind! And that’s OK. I know some readers like and want certainty, even most maybe, but as a kid like Jess, so long as people would just let me be me, I was OK just letting things unfold and felt no pressure to understand or know the answer to the riddle of who I was.
Also, any kid who’s reading my book and is where Jess is, she’s probably thinking my story (and me as an author) is “on her side,” understanding her; if I write here or elsewhere that Jess turns out to be something different than what they think they are or are going to be, then revealing that could be interpreted as me saying they’re wrong, mistaken. I don’t want to do that, invalidate them by even suggesting that I know how J’s story “should” end. I just want to be saying I understand how you feel right now, and if you’re still confused or questioning, that’s OK because Jess is too. You are OK, and you are safe and fine and can be happy just being you, whatever that is. Just be that for now.
Author Links
Links will open in a new tab.
Buy it!
Buy a copy of North of Tomboy here, and help support local bookstores!
This is an affiliate link, and I will earn a commission on any sales.
Pin it to Pinterest!
Thanks, Laura!