The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler, by Gene Kemp

[rachelmanija]

What did the cross-eyed teacher say?

"I can't control my pupils."

All the chapters start with this kind of kid joke, which is something Tyke loves. Tyke Tiler is a mischievous, athletic kid whose best friend is Danny, who has a severe speech impediment and a learning/developmental disability.

The ostensible plot is that Danny is going to be sent to a different school unless he can pass a test, but mostly it's an episodic story about two kids raising hell and being loyal to each other. The tone is similar to the William books by Richmal Crompton, if anyone's read those, but less farcical. It's fun.

I had a very weird experience reading this book. Since I knew there was a big twist, the instant I read the back cover, I was positive that Danny and Tyke were the same person.

Spoiler: Danny and Tyke are absolutely not the same person, as is extremely obvious almost immediately, but I was so convinced they were that I kept thinking up absurd explanations for why teachers might address them by two different names and people talk about them to each other.

Eventually I decided that they had to be separate people, and the twist would actually be some kind of cement truck tragedy.

Spoiler: There is no cement truck tragedy.

So I stopped looking for a "it was this all along" type of twist, except for a brief interlude in which I was absolutely convinced that Tyke had been dead all along due to a mention of joining Tom, who is very much alive but whom I misremembered as being a long-dead soldier.

Spoiler: Tyke is not dead all along.

As two of you clever readers guessed, the twist is that...



Tyke is a girl. Not a girl disguised as a boy, just a girl whose best friend is a boy, who has an androgynous nickname, and who doesn't conform to gender stereotypes. In general, no one has a problem with this.

No one ever calls her a boy or, in retrospect, does anything to indicate gender one way or another. The only reason readers assume she's a boy is what they bring to the book: either all the other books they've read starring characters like Tyke in which they're always boys, or their own assumptions about what girls can be like or whether girls and boys can be friends. It's very neatly done with zero preaching.



So that was a surreal reading experience. If you ever want one for yourself, take any random book which is primarily about the relationship of two people, and start reading it under the impression that they are either the same person, or one of them is a ghost.

Comments

[sovay]

The only reason readers assume she's a boy is what they bring to the book: either all the other books they've read starring characters like Tyke in which they're always boys, or their own assumptions about what girls can be like or whether girls and boys can be friends.

I would love to know if this effect works with generations of later readers, who may have been trained differently by other kinds of book.

[rachelmanija]

Me too. It completely fooled me, partly because in addition to thinking there would be a completely different type of reveal, I had also thought the book had been written much earlier than it actually had been.

[sovay]

I had also thought the book had been written much earlier than it actually had been.

I looked up the book just now to check the date and saw the author herself had a gender-ambiguous name.

[rachelmanija]

She sounds great.

[naomikritzer]

It reminds me of that "brain teaser" of my childhood, you know: a man and his son are driving somewhere and have a terrible accident. The man is killed and his son is gravely injured. The child is rushed to the hospital and into surgery and the surgeon comes out and looks down and says, "I cannot operate on this boy, he is my son." How is this possible?

Kids these days are really confused that this is a puzzle. The answer is supposed to be "the surgeon is his mom," but sometimes they go with, "the surgeon is the other dad."

[recessional]

The answer is supposed to be "the surgeon is his mom," but sometimes they go with, "the surgeon is the other dad."

This is the best thing I have heard all day and I thank you kindly for sharing it.

[lilacsigil]

Ha, yes, I tried this one on my nephews and they were confused because what was the puzzle? They second-guessed themselves that there was time-travel involved because they thought "it's his mum" was too obvious.

[rachelmanija]

I love the time-travel scenario.

[rachelmanija]

Ha! That is delightful.

[ethelmay]

I remember being puzzled by that and then being incensed with myself for not getting it, as in fact my mother was a doctor (though not a surgeon, she was an anesthesiologist, so in surgery a lot).

[frith_in_thorns]

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.)