Review by Mack Hassler
“…his demons are driving him [the lead violinist]….The company takes up the choruses and men and women cry oit like all possessed… some celebrate the beauty of the bride and the joys of love in the excitement….”
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1929), pp. 10-11.“…[a study] that suggested that celibacy had lately doubled among people in their early twenties. The Atlantic gave this evident trend a working title with a cover story on “The Sex Recession.”
The New Yorker (June 30, 2025), p. 58.
North of Tomboy is appearing at a very important moment in the history of our culture on sexuality, and I am working on this review at exactly the 10 year anniversary of the legislation permitting same sex marriage.. I could have chosen many epigraphs celebrating this event. But I wanted, instead. to emphasize the contrast in sexuality that I have been reading about recently. Years ago when I was just beginning to read books, I read a great “Middle Grade” fiction that made me want to grow up and join the army (it was during World War II and I was a teenager). Luckily. I never had to go to War. By the time Viet Nam came along, I was in graduate school and married with children. But Johnny Tremain {1943} is a book I have never forgotten. It had a huge effect on my mind ar the time So I know the importance of this fiction by Swanson. Therefore the contrast in the epigraphs I choose above seems more important to begin with conceptually and more interesting than to celebrate a new freedom that we have chosen for ourselves. Same sex marriages may certainly include children. But children are only conceived within the passion and excitement that is given to us along with language and even with the knowledge of death. Our generations come to us with great passion as well as a great sense of time and loss
Sinclair’s novel opens not with Jazz but rather with driving “demon like” music at a wedding dinner where the groom’s party work in the killing fields of the stock yards all day and so are primed for “copulation” once vows have been made—very blood-oriented and lusty linking the knives of daytime to the driving lust once work is done It makes me anxious to open with so much cultural vividness, even vulgarity, but the Swanson narrative is asking for it. She has actually constructed an autobiographical narrative set at roughly the same time I was reading and being influenced by the story about Johnny Tremain. It looks as though her character “Jess” in fourth grade would be fantasizing just around 1943, and Swanson says in her author statement that “she decided one day to write this narrative about whom she really wanted to be.” Also, Jess’s “little Mickey” whom she transformed from a small baby girl doll given to her by her parents into a boy is called a “little Frankenstein “ in one of the book blurbs on the back cover of the book. So our current “sexual recession “ mentioned in the second epigraph above calls for a little sexual Frankenstein perhaps At the very end of the book Mickey gets into a tug of war with Jess’s Dad and he calls Jess his “one tough cookie” Jess admits she is tough but says she is no cookie. P. 345
So finally I think the “Mickey” of Swanson’s imagination is made to influence our children, to make them tougher and more filled with driving passion and less like cookie dough. I think North of Tomboy is here at the right time and it is in the right genre. We may need more deep roots at the base of our sexualiy, even in the same sex marriage revolution we are just now celebrating. To end with music again, I think Swanson has struck an important chord. Maybe like me hoping to emulate good old Johnny Tremain, maybe some cookie dough girls will read and hope to become “tougher” about real human sexuality, to raise the stock some. Children are often formed by their early reading.
North of Tomboy, Middle Grade Fiction, by Julie A. Swanson (Spark Press, Sparkpoint Studio, LLC, Phoenix, Arizona 85007, 2025), 355 pages, pbk $14,9
