Chantel's Reviews > Boy Parts

** spoiler alert ** It is important to note that the majority of the themes explored in this book deal with sensitive subject matters. My review, therefore, touches on these topics as well. Many people might find the subject matters of the book as well as those detailed in my review overwhelming. I would suggest you steer clear of both if this is the case. Please note that from this point forward I will be writing about matters which contain reflections on the death of a minor, sexual violence, rape, substance abuse, disordered eating, distorted body image, bigotry, transphobia, psychological distress, & others.

Irina is about the same age as I am while writing this review. Every aspect of her person reads like the residue of saliva caught in the corners of a speaker’s mouth. What this story offers the reader is an unbearable drone of dullness. Nothing happens that does not circle in on itself a couple of pages later. Readers might ask themselves what the purpose of such a book is. Why is Irina such a shadow of a person? What part of this narrative is meant to induce cerebral elation; fear; tremors in the soul? What is the point of this story?
 
My conclusion is that there is no purpose to this narrative. There is no point in writing this story because there is no story to be told. When the reader meets Irina it is abundantly clear that we will be faced with a person who has the lung capacity to sing their own praises but remains debilitated by the smoothness of her grey matter. It wouldn’t be accurate to call Irina an egotistical maniac, though, this is certainly what she is. It wouldn’t be right to deem her narcissistic or pessimistic, existential, nihilistic, or dissociated. Irina is insufficient.
 
The main character of a book does not need to be a dandelion in a field of green to be appreciated. The main character of a book needs to be tangible; they need to be sleek like wet paint, stimulating like oral consumption, & evocative like our own reflection in a mirror. Irina is simply a caricature; the result of a disjointed group effort to combine repulsive human tendencies into a single person. The result is that none of her traits or characteristics read as being more than a weak-willed attempt at extremism.
 
There are communities of people who live their lives in ways that differ significantly from what the collective has deemed as being normal. Whether this is a reflection of a person’s sexual desires, their eating habits, their inner monologue, or the ways in which they style their hair—these aspects remain avant-garde insofar as the person actioning them has the gumption to carry them forward with courage. This story significantly lacks a character with such poise & dedication to themselves that they are able to present their person in life as anything worth paying attention to.
 
Within this story, we read about Irina’s perception of self rather too often. In a time where our personal image & desired characteristics are showcased cyclically, there is no room for people like Irina. There is no space left in the brain of the reader to imagine someone with an inflated sense of self with none of the gumption to back their claims. Irina watches tentacle porn. How ground-breaking. Irina photographs men in the nude or in sexually explicit positions. How different than all the other photographers who have already been doing that. Irina exhibits disordered eating because thinness is the ultimate beauty. What a shockingly original take. /s
 
What part of the world in which she lives is out of Irina’s grasp? Reading about such things—as I listed above & many others—reads as very sheltered. I feel confused as to what position the author felt they were taking when compounding so many random aspects of lore into a single character. The year in which this story takes place does not allow for any of these aspects to come across as interesting. Rather, every time Irina spoke about only eating salads, I felt immeasurably bored. Irina felt perpetually stuck in the past of her own accord.
 
Because the main character has no girth to their person & because every trait of her person is willed into her bones by sheer determination to exude the otherness that people experience when vulnerable; Irina becomes a non-entity within a story that is meant to focus solely on her. Why should we care about the films she watches? Those films exist because people made them. This means that someone other than Irina desired to have this art form made into a reality. Ergo, she is not unique.
 
This is perhaps a harsh take. After all, human beings are a reflection of their environments. Irina is not the first person to exhibit tendencies toward self-harm. She is not the only person to have dyed her hair or to have had a negative relationship with her parent. Rather than see any of these aspects explored with depth, we read about Irina in her name alone. Irina is the title of a spreadsheet where numerous people invested three minutes of their time adding bullet points to a document that would be scrapped anyways.
 
Certainly, people who believe that no part of life has any meaning might view this story as an interesting take on listicles. However, as this story progresses towards more debilitating violence I wonder why no one thought that it might be a good idea to link the personality they desired to craft to the shell of a person wandering the pages. Our actions do not necessarily seamlessly lead to one another.  Sometimes a person simply wanted to eat an orange; they didn’t need a commercial to influence that desire. Yet through our actions we reveal ourselves.
 
We sneak glimpses of Irina’s desire to do that—perhaps the author felt that there was something innately missing from her character to make her a real living being. However, this lasts one single scene. Leaving me to believe that it was not the well-crafted writing of the author that flaunted the inner desires of her otherwise destitute character but rather the fluke chance that her humanity carried over into her storytelling.
 
What does this all mean? When I saw the cover art for this book I was eager to explore a story that dealt with gender roles, imposed torment regarding sexuality, & the judgments of the all-seeing-eyes towards our very sense of self. Within the pages of this book, we find the poverty of any of these explorations. How does Irina’s claim that all East Asian women are the same essence anything other than the narrative pushed by geriatric Western racism? How is Irina’s derogatory behaviour towards a Trans character anything other than the maniacal social delay perpetrated by bigotry? How is Irina anything other than what is?
 
There is no exploration of paranormal beings; nothing veers left to divert starkly from the world that exists all around the readers. No part of this story alleviates itself from its own strain. What does it bring to the story to have Irina rape & torture men? What does it bring to the story to reveal that Irina is a murderer? It brings nothing. It is entirely disappointing to read about a character so outside of herself that she fails to realize that all of these secrets she believes she keeps are well-documented & studied subject matters.
 
Why, then, is Irina unable to ground herself in the world? Why does she refute bisexuality in a story meant to engage with this very same subject? What part of assigned gender roles is explored when Irina degrades a person because they are not tall in stature but have put forth their entire will & effort into presenting as the person they feel they are inside? What I take from this is no nouveau riche perspective on gender or sexuality. Rather, this entire book is demonically idiotic.
 
Where was the essence of reality? One thought to another thought to another thought, without any semblance of string tying any of it to Irina does not a person make. This story exhibits a drowned potential that the town stood around to watch take place. Within this very narrative there existed the potential for Irina to be sociopathic while still having the depth of her person to exist in the real world. It is exuberantly obvious when a person who is gorging on themselves walks around in society.
 
There exist too many studies on the deficiencies of human beings. People who are ravenous for harming the bodies of children & animals; people who leave others at the side of the roads; people who view ethnicity as a race against each other. There is no shortage of literature that will expose the demise of our kin. What part of this is explored in this story? At what point does Irina’s raving lunacies about how sexually desirable she is, develop into the reflective piece this story boasts itself to be?
 
It is not enough to claim that presenting Irina as a girl different from all other girls, will reveal the nucleus of this tale. Irina is in fact nothing more than a shadow; a skinwalker, if you will. She raves about how explicit she can be. She pushes back on her experiences by recycling what has been done. Again, this is not new. Abuse presents itself in the cloistered limbs of the victim.
 
Regardless of this fact, Irina is not that person. Because there is no depth to her & because the author does not deliberately state things, we are left in a Ferris wheel facing a decaying concrete wall. Putting things into clear language leaves the reader with no room to escape. The villain lives in our world. With extra care taken to create the shell on which Irina leans to entice men to come into her garage, we could have been met with terror.
 
Irina could have been the monster who actually presented how ludicrous it is for people to believe the terrible things that they do. Irina could have been a siren perusing the streets with shiny new legs set on her body specifically to reveal the treachery of sexual exploitation. Irina’s photography could have revealed the pornographic cesspool of bigotry & the craze of monetization that exists towards the female form. Instead of that, we are faced with a white-eyed creature unable to form coherent sentences; left to loom in the corner of a mouse pen in the hopes that another rodent will claw her a path to freedom.