[In The Girl Who Wanted a Boy] Sibella Cametta, 15 year old clod and scientific whiz, learns that it is better to have loved and lost than not to have loved at all. Zindel's adolescent novels are not everyone's cup of tea, but I love them. This one, too, is a fun house ride where one careens from heartache to hilarity without time to adjust to the author's antic zaniness. Sibella's mother and sister are faintly likeable horrors, the object of her affections is a poor girl's [Marlon] Brando, and Sibella herself has a juggernaut methodology that invests her quest for a boy friend with genuine black comedy. Perhaps it's this term black comedy, hastily borrowed from stage parlance, that is the key to Zindel's adolescent novels: he is to the teen novel what [Edward] Albee is to drama. It's a mistake to chide him for fantastic plot shifts, or a gallery of grotesqueries masquerading as normal people. His exaggerations pin point the absurdities of normalcy, and his novels carry the theme of loving and being loved like contraband with a homing device.
That is not to say that there are no flaws in The Girl Who Wanted a Boy; Sibella's father is a bloodless oracle, and her mother's insightfulness comes a little too late in the story…. What is new and compelling is the force with which Sibella's pain is delineated—she knows what she wants, and she is utterly without the proper resources to procure it. Her misery and her refusal to be done in by that misery will communicate to kids and haunt adults.
Judith N. Mitchell, in her review of "The Girl Who Wanted a Boy," in Voice of Youth Advocates (copyrighted 1981 by Voice of Youth Advocates), Vol. 4, No. 4, October, 1981, p. 40.
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