The Education of Bet~ Lauren Baratz-Logsted Review

 Enjoyment: ☺☺☺☼

Plot: ☺☺☼

Characters: ☺☺☺☼

Setting: ☺☺☺☺☼

Overall: ☺☺☺☼

The young man looking back at me was handsome and gave off an air of self-confidence.

There was just one problem; two, actually.

The barely discernible bulge in the front of the trousers had been created by a carefully balled-up pair of stockings.

And the young gentleman--I--was a girl.

When Will and Bet were four, tragic circumstances brought them to the same house, to be raised by a wealthy gentleman as brother and sister, Now sixteen, they appear content with the life fate has bestowed upon them.

But appearances can be deceiving. Bet can experience only what society allows for a girl. Will is afforded much more freedom, but still only as society dictates. Neither is happy.

So Bet comes up with a plan and persuades Will to give it a try: She'll go to school as Will. Will can lives as he chooses.

But when she arrives at school, the reality doesn't match what Bet imagined. Boys act very differently when they don't think there's a girl in their midst. In fact, they can be rather brutish. But brutish Bet can deal with. It's the stirrings of attraction for her roommate that get Bet into real trouble.

This is not the education Bet expected.

~*~*~*~*~*~

When I picked up this book that first thing that came to mind was She's The Man. A simplified summary would be that it is about a girl who is unable to play soccer at the level that she wishes because she is a girl and so she takes her brothers place in a private all boys school while he travels through Europe with his band. It has been a while since I actually saw the movie but I figure that I got the basics right. Yet when I picked this book up I felt that this would be very similar to the movie but set in a very different time. I was very interested in how she would hide who she was and I was expecting many laughs.

My first assumption was very close to the mark. However a big difference between the book and the movie is the motivation behind the decisions. The Education of Bet is a light novel with some interesting conflicts and is an overall good read. After all how can you not find a romance between two characters when one of them thinks that they are both males not funny. Especially in a time when homophobia was at its height. (Please do not quote me on that. I do not really know if homophobia really was at an all time high.)