Title: There’s a Boy in the Girls’ Bathroom
Author: Louis Sachar
Type: Fiction
Page Count/Review Word Count: 195
Rating: 3.5/5
The first thing to mention about this one is that from the title alone, a lot of my friends thought that this book was going to touch on trans rights, which just isn’t the case. With that said, it’s not exactly anti-trans, either. It’s just that for a young kid, the idea of there being a boy in the girls’ bathroom seems scandalous, and our protagonist longs to go inside the girls’ bathroom himself to see what it looks like. Surely it must be very different to the boys’ bathroom, right?
The story itself is essentially a sort of coming-of-age redemption arc, except for a middle grade audience instead of young adults. Bradley Chalkers, the unlikeable bully that we have as a main character, has a fairly interesting journey throughout the novel, but it was nothing particularly special. The most notable thing was the sensitive way with which it addressed counselling and tackled some of the negative preconceptions that parents might have towards the field.
