Like Other Girls

Overview

Mara's season ends before it really begins: a fight on the basketball court gets her benched, and her coach makes it clear she needs to prove she can play well with others before she's welcome back. Determined to show she has what it takes, Mara turns to a sport she's always loved from the sidelines but never played herself — football. With her brother Noah and her best friend Quinn backing her up, she talks her way onto the team and discovers she's got real talent for the game.

What starts as one girl's bid for redemption quickly becomes something bigger than she intended. Her decision to join the team is read by others in town as a statement about gender and sports, and four more girls sign up in response. Suddenly Mara isn't just a player — she's lumped in with a group of newcomers still learning the difference between a handoff and a blitz, even though she'd rather be seen on her own merits.

The shift gets more complicated at home, too. Valentina, the girl Mara has a crush on, is one of the new recruits, and so is Carly, the very rival whose fight with Mara got her kicked off her old team in the first place. Between family tension, budding romance, and old grudges replayed on a new field, Mara is forced to rethink what she assumed she knew about teams, rivals, and herself.

Beyond the Scoreboard

Lundin's novel uses the structure of a sports story — tryouts, practices, a season building toward something — to examine questions that have little to do with football itself: who gets to claim a space, what it means to be part of a group you didn't choose, and how personal ambition can be reinterpreted as public symbolism whether or not that was ever the intent. Mara doesn't set out to make a point; the point gets made for her, and much of the book's tension comes from her trying to reclaim her own story from the narrative others have built around it.

The novel also sits squarely in a wave of contemporary YA that pairs athletic competition with coming-of-age questions about sexuality and identity, following Mara's own uncertainty about her feelings for a teammate alongside the more conventional plot of an underdog trying to make the roster. Reviewers have noted the book's balance of humor and emotional weight, and its willingness to let its characters — including the ones positioned as rivals — be more complicated than a simple hero-and-foil setup would allow.

Why Like Other Girls Has Been Challenged

Much of the scrutiny directed at the novel centers on its depiction of Mara's growing attraction to a female teammate and the way that storyline is woven through an otherwise mainstream sports narrative aimed at teen readers. Objectors have argued that the romantic content involving same-sex attraction is too mature or explicit for the book's intended age group, and some have framed its presence in a school-sports story as an inappropriate pairing of subject matter for younger readers. Others have raised concerns about the book's frank discussion of gender roles in athletics, pointing to scenes where characters debate who "belongs" on a football team as a vehicle for broader commentary they consider unsuitable for a school setting. In this catalog, the novel has been formally challenged in 2 states and 2 districts, with objections consistently centered on its handling of sexuality and identity rather than its sports plot or family drama.