THE DAY JOANIE FRANKENHAUSER BECAME A BOY

Skinny, scruffy and undeveloped, ten-year-old Joanie Frankenhauser loves to play sports, especially football. But because she’s a girl, none of the boys on her team will pass her the ball even though she can outplay most of them. Moreover, her parents have forbidden her to write anymore of her violent SuperKid stories, something she knows her brothers could do without parental concern or comment. Then, after her family moves to a new community, something wonderful happens. Joanie, whose given name is Joan, is listed as John on the school register and instead of correcting the mistake, she decides to cut her scraggly hair short and act like a boy. Juxtaposing Joanie’s first-person narrative with her SuperKid stories, Lantz’s sympathetic protagonist learns that being a boy comes with its own set of rules and pressures, and that it isn’t as easy as she imagined. Although marred by a heavy-handed and overly explicit hammering of theme, Lantz’s good intentions shine through and her exploration of sexual roles in childhood is both provocative and thoughtful. (Fiction. 10-13)