Megan Leyman

Hello all to the second to last book review of the year!

Oh boy, I have covered 4 different books since May via my book reviews and it has been so much fun to read and review them.

I am ending this year with a story that really caught me by surprise, Boys Meets Maria by Peyo (English version is translated by Seven Seas Entertainment)

Taiga dreams of becoming an actor, so the first thing he does upon entering high school is join the drama club. There, he meets the beautiful, enigmatic Maria and immediately falls in love with her. Not long after, Taiga is told that she is actually a boy – but is that all there is to Maria’s story?

from the back cover of the book

I just discovered this book as a recommendation from a recent purchase and similar to my very first book review, it’s just the one book and not like 4 volumes so it’s going to make this review easier compared to A Silent Voice or Boys Run The Riot.

I will repeat what I said earlier, this book really caught me by surprise on it’s story of a boy discovering someone who is transgender.

Before I go into how this book surprised me, let’s go into the art work.

I think the cover, the colour pages and the story’s art work are amazing, it sure stands out on my bookcase!

The two main characters of Taiga, someone who always wanted to be someones hero and “got a brain like an elementary school kid, wants to live in a fantasy world” as one of Taiga friends describes him.

Taiga falls in love with “Maria”, the star of the school & the drama club. Even Taiga finding out that “Maria” is actually a boy, this young lad is obsessed with finding out more about this mysterious beautiful performer and this involves becoming better at acting, even having private lessons with Maria to get better, to be their hero.

I want to go more into Maria, but the book and story itself is about going more into this character.

With that out of the way, I want to get into why this book surprised me.

I just love Maria’s character so much, Maria & Taiga really get on well and they have great chemistry together, it hooks you in.

Kind of a spoiler but I really want to talk about it

Now let’s go into it.

This is regarding Maria, who is trans but the thing that surprised me is it was not this persons choice to dress and pretend to be a girl, it was because of their parent.

I will only say that, you will need to read the book to read more into why the parent forced their child into pretending to be a girl and the trauma that Maria had to go through because of it.

This got to me, as someone who is trans, I decided on what I wanted to do on my own accord, no one forced me into it.

I argued with my parents for a lot of my childhood to confirm to them that it wasn’t just a phase, but they never forced me.

The thing is, there have been real life stories of parents doing this and that scares me.

I won’t say anymore on this as I should cover this whole thing in a post of its own.

With the hard subject out of the way, I am happy to say that this book has got a great ending & even an extra chapter after the ending too.

I need to do a ranking of the books I have received this year and that will provide a challenge as all of them have been great.

In short this is set in school with a great love story between two kids who love acting.

I highly recommend it but just have to remind you that is also covers some hard hitting subjects too.

With that, I will end the review, you can purchase the book here

Thanks for reading!

Megan