How to Say Goodbye in Robot

I would like to write a review of How to Say Goodbye in Robot, but mostly I want to talk about the packaging, and the gender segregation of reading.

How to Say Goodbye in Robot, by Natalie Standiford is about a girl named Bea who moves to new town and meets Jonah, an outcast boy, by chance and then becomes sort of friends with him. It's very much a young adult book. Its all about friendship in the face of social structures. What saves it is the quirky narrator and the fact that all the teen characters are likable.

My problem with this book is that it's very pink. Here's a picture for refference:

But that's not the limit of the pink; the end plates, the page numbers, anything bold, the division between parts, its all pink. There's literally no page that's free of pink. There's nothing wrong with pink. Its a fine color, but I don't think there's any other color with as strong a connotation. By up-ending the pink paint can over HtSGiR, the publishers marked it clearly as a book for girls. Can you imagine the looks a teen boy would get reading that book on the bus to high school?

There are some books that I can understand giving the pink treatment, Gossip Girl maybe, or even the Anne of Green Gables series, but HtSGiR is not a book that boys wouldn't enjoy. The only reason I can think of to pink-ify it is because the narrator is a girl. Apparently, the publishers think boys don't read about girls and need an advanced warning system. Boys certainly won't read about girls if every book with more than one female character is packaged as for girls only.

The book gets 5/8.

The cover gets 0/8.