Girl Parts

Girl Parts John M. Cusick

David and Charlie are two students at an elite boys school. They have a new guidance counselor who thinks all the boys have an associate disorder and wants them to try an experimental treatment-- they get a robot from Japan. A girl robot.

Charlie doesn't go for it, but David does. Rose is beautiful and programmed to live David. She has an arrow that points straight to her man. Her entire artificial existence is for him. It's a little creepy. It's like a perfect 1950s ideal stereotype housewife is what's going to teach boys how to interact with real people?

But, when things go wrong, Rose discovers pain and heartbreak and Charlie.

I really started liking this book when things went wrong and Rose started becoming almost human. I liked her discovery of feelings that weren't nice, of vodka, and of life without a database to fill her in on the background. I'm still not sure how the robot is supposed to teach about real-life relationships, especially when the girlbots are so perfectly aligned to do everything to please the man they were built for. So, I got really confused at the end when the treatment seemed to actually work.

I read this one a few weeks ago and I'm still not sure how I feel about it. There were parts that made me really angry and seemed rather anti-feminist, and then there are parts I really, really liked. It gave me a lot to think about, but the way it ended leaves me on the fence. I'm still not sure how I feel about the final point that the therapy worked. I don't think it would have. So it loses points for a possibly anti-feminist message, but it gains a lot of points in that I'm still thinking about it and what it may or may not be saying.

Book Provided by... my local library

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