BOY

Brimming with real historical events, BOY is about not only perennially popular matters high-stakes political intrigue, true love, coming of age but is also a riveting historical- fiction take on current cultural inflection points: the perils of extreme celebrity, women's autonomy, girls' access to the sciences, and above all, the role of gender in society.

19-year-old Sander Cooke is the most renowned "boy player" in Elizabethan London, for whom Shakespeare writes the largest female roles. Stunningly attractive, he's spent his adolescence enjoying his androgynous celebrity, which guarantees him lovers of all classes, genders, and predilections. But he's nearing the end of his apprenticeship. As a boy trained to be convincingly female, he feels unprepared to "be a man" and is thrown into a crisis of identity. His brilliant best friend from childhood, Joan Buckler, yearns to be a scientist something out of reach for a female commoner. But Sander's status grants him access to the elite of London intelligentsia; he disguises Joan as a boy and arranges for "Jack" to be apprenticed to England's greatest natural philosopher, legal counselor to Queen Elizabeth and the founder of the Scientific Method: Francis Bacon. 'Jack' becomes Bacon's invaluable research assistant just as Joan and Sander begin to fall in love. But when the disgraced Earl of Essex offers to be Sander's patron for life, Joan is thrown into a crisis of loyalty: Bacon requires her to either foreswear Sander or lose her apprenticeship. Then Sander is unjustly implicated in Essex's unhinged rebellion against the crown one of the most dramatic events of Elizabeth's reign. Not even William Shakespeare can save him. The queen commands Bacon to prosecute the case, pitting Joan's mentor against her lover. Joan rises to the challenge: 'Jack Butler, law student' interrupts Sander's trial, and uses Bacon's own philosophy against him with aShakespearean twist to save her beloved.