Recycler
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
How do you grow up, if who you are keeps changing?
Jill McTeague is not your average high school graduate, she’s a scientific anomaly. Every month for four days she turns into Jack, a guy—complete with all the parts. Now everyone in her hometown knows that something very weird is up with her. So what’s a girl (and a guy) to do? Get the heck out of town, that’s what! With her kooky best friend, Ramie, Jill sets out for New York City. There both she and Jack will have to figure out everything from the usual (relationships) to the not so usual (career options for a “cycler,” anyone?).
As in Cycler, the first book featuring Jack and Jill, author Lauren McLaughlin deftly weaves the downright mundane with the outright bizarre in a story that, while defying classification, is peopled with characters that readers can fully relate to.
“The sort of book that makes your eyes widen and that you don’t want to put down.”—Bookavore
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The idea governing this debut novel is as fascinating as it is grotesque: for the four days before Jill McTeague gets her period, she is a guy her body literally morphs, with a full complement of genitalia, body hair and musculature. Her male self calls himself Jack (the chapters alternate between Jill's and Jack's voices). Jill and her parents keep Jack caged in Jill's bedroom until he changes back into Jill, who then returns to school, her social life and her heterosexual romantic aspirations as if nothing has happened. For the first third of the book, the premise substitutes for a plot; at this point, Jack goes after Ramie, Jill's free-spirited best friend, while Jill learns that the guy she likes is bisexual. What with the escalating craziness of Jill/Jack's parents and the sex scenes (including Jack's responses to the porn his mother buys for him), the degree to which McLaughlin pushes toward the ever-more-disturbing seems gratuitous. The gender-bending premise, certainly guaranteed to grab teens' interest, is much more fun (and possibly more fruitful) to talk about than to read about here. Ages 14 up.
