Anthea and Robin fall in love and team up as the ‘Messenger Girls’, protest artists raising awareness about water, LGBT and women’s rights. It turns out Girl Meets Boy is the story of two sisters, Anthea and Imogen, meeting Robin, the androgynous Iphis character. It’s such an obscure myth, too, and it was my first time reading anything by Ali Smith, so I was excited to see what she would do with it. According to Ovid, this was absolutely necessary for her to marry her true love, Ianthe, which is a shame for lesbian representation, but great for genderqueer retellings like Girl Meets Boy. Iphis is one of the happy ones, though, a delightfully queer and upbeat story about a girl raised as a boy who is eventually turned into a man. That’s also a fun read if you’re into Greco-Roman mythology, though some of the myths are grim. It first appeared in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a compendium of myths about transformation. I’ve got to say, I love the myth of Iphis.
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