rachelmanija | (Reply)

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I'm 32, so not really a later generation, but I recently read The Boy At The Back Of The Class, a recent MG book set in London, which does a very similar thing (and it's unfortunate that there's literally no way to name the book in the context of the discussion without also making the twist clear!) In this case, it's a first-person POV of a protagonist who's about ten befriending a boy who's arrived as a refugee from Syria and speaks no English. I now can't remember the protag's name, but it's something like Alex, who has a close friend group already of two boys and a girl. And I definitely defaulted to assuming they were a boy without even thinking about it! Again, neatly done. And then in the chapter or so after we found out the narrator was a girl, it also becomes clear she's Brown, and yeah, it definitely made me think about the assumptions I'd brought to it. (It's a book I would recommend overall very much to children, but there were some things (not about the narrator, other stuff in the plot) which as an adult I found rather too over-contrived even accounting for MG Book Logic.)