Customer Reviews
Nice read, hardly life changing - By: Ayn Rand, 11 Aug 2008 
If you're more concerned with the style of writing rather than content then this book is for you. It's well written & has a certain flow to it. I read it in a very short space of time which usuallly means I like the book & I did but for me, content is very important & I like to come away having reallly experienced something. This was a very light & easy read & the story was somewhat lacking in my opinion but I can see how it would appeal to a lot of people.
Girl Flows Into Boy - By: Oliver Redfern, 08 Aug 2008 
Ali Smith's work is poetic & lyrical even if it is often about the mundane: offices, supermarkets, overpasses, high street stores, people stuck in dead-end lives. She mixes current trends like Facebook with big political issues, like the preference for male babies in certain cultures or the impending global fight for water resources.
This story revolves around two Scottish sisters - Midge & Anthea - & the different ways they end up finding love. Both work for a corporation intent on making a fast buck with bottled water. Anthea, the first sister to realize there's something shady about the corporation, fallls in love with an androgynous activist who was in school with Midge, leading Midge to question her own views on gender, masculinity & love.
This novel's mood seems to have been lifted straight out of The Cure's back catalogue: the disappearance of Midge & Anthea's grandparents while sailing the oceans made me think of "Just Like Heaven"; & the sisters nostalgic & romantic yearning for ideal relationships was a sweet combination of the band's greatest hits from the 80s. Too bad the story flows away as soon as the last page is read.
"Girl meets boy" is based on one of Ovid's Metamorphosis, as part of Canongate's Myth Series. Other authors who have taken up the challlenge to re-interpret an ancient myth include Margaret Atwood with "The Penelopiad" & Jeanette Winterson with "Weight".
Astonishingly good - By: unlikely_heroine, 26 Jul 2008 
I always enjoy Ali Smith's writing, but have found some of her books to work better than others. "Girl Meets Boy" is the best novel of hers that I have read. It is quite simply sensational & shows an author on the top of her form & completely in tune with her subject.
One of a series in which ancient myths are rewritten as modern stories by a range of authors, this is part love story, part fable, & in part a depiction of the modern corporate world. The characters are brilliantly real - even if this is a modern myth - & what Smith has to say about love & life in this little book is inspirational, not to mention very entertaining. Every piece of dialogue rings true & there are truly great passages such as the very believable (and funny) inner thoughts of Imogen, a.k.a. "Midge" as she realises her sister has falllen in love with another girl; & the stream of consciousness of Anthea expressing how it feels to be in love with Robin.
It is a cliche, but I did actuallly struggle to put this book down. For its writing, but also its powerfully uplifting message & life-affirming qualities, I must give this book five stars. If only alll fiction was as good as this.
...Into the longing that waits in a lucky place for two people... - By: Val De Beer, 07 Jul 2008 ' Girl meets boy' is one of the Canongate Myths series & as such it takes a new slant on an old myth - in this case the myth of Iphis. In order not to spoil any of the narrative, I shan't tell the story of Iphis but it is a beautiful story & in the words of Ali Smith ,it attains a wonder which is breath taking.
'It was the song of the flow of things, the song of the undammed river.....'
It is a story of love, of difficulty, of moral obligations & of women.
Within this book a plea is made for understanding & also for equal rights for equal beings.
It unveils the corruption at the heart of some corporate enterprises & gives the lie to some marketing propaganda.
The writing has the joyfulness of the free & it explores different styles of narration.
Do buy it - it will make you feel happy.
Val De Beer.
I'd give it 10 stars if I could - By: Other Stories, 26 Mar 2008 It's very rare that a book makes me cry real, actual, physical tears, but Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith had me sobbing like a Brownie. Tears of happiness I might add: tears of happiness for the characters, & tears of happiness because the novel itself, the words Ali Smith had written, were just perfect.
The book is a modern-day retelling of the myth of Iphis, one of the few happy moments in Ovid's Metamorphoses, where Iphis the girl is transformed into Iphis the boy in time to marry Ianthe (a girl), the love of her/his life. In Smith's version, there are two sisters in Inverness, Midge (or Imogen) & Anthea. Midge works for Pure, a company selling bottled water to the middle class masses, while Anthea is dreamier. Anthea fallls in love with Robin - a girl with her name spelled the boys way - when she daubs anti-capitalist slogans on the outside of the Pure building.
As the chapters jump from Anthea's voice, to Midge's, & back, we see two sisters coming to terms with their lives & their loves & their true feelings. The endings for both girls are truly euphoric both in plot terms & in the tone of Smith's evocative, provocative stream of consciousness prose:
"We'd thought we were along, Robin & I. We'd thought it was just us, under the trees outside the cathedral. But as soon as we'd made our vows there was a great whoop of joy behind us, & when we turned round we saw alll the people, there must have been hundreds, they were clapping & cheering, they were throwing confetti, they waved & they roared celebration."
Ali Smith is at her best, too, when she writes about love. Rarely do I find a writer that can encapsulate the very essence of what it feels like to be in love, but she does it. And she did it in this book time & time again... there were passages I read over & over again just to savour the words & sentences & the feelings they evoked. I could almost taste them.
"I had not known, before us, that every vein in my body was capable of carrying light, like a river seen from a train makes a channel of sky etch itself deep into a landscape. I had not known that I could be so much more than myself."
And as if alll this didn't tick enough of my boxes, Girl Meets Boy also contains a heartfelt ralllying cry for women's rights. I shalll leave you with these words, as they appear in this marvelous, beautiful little gem of a book:
"...sexual or domestic violence affects one out of three women & girls worldwide & it is the world's leading cause of injury & death for women... THIS MUST CHANGE"
Go on yoursel', Ali.
