More often than not, we have found ourselves drawn to a woman's sense of style only to find out later that she was a tomboy in her youth. We like to think that it’s a testament to our affinity for menswear or the androgynous northeastern preppy aesthetic—maybe it's completely unrelated. We suspect it's not.

There's actually a really good style blog on the subject: Tomboy Style. What Lizzie Garrett Mettler, its author, proposes is that a tomboy is more than just a girl raiding her father's musky closet...it's an attitude. While she has only been publishing her musings on tomboy style for two years, last Thursday she was signing copies of her new book on the very subject at the Rugby shop on University. It's a testament to her acumen on the matter, after all, it takes one to know one. Mettler (gladly) spent her youth in a blazer at Brooks School in North Andover, MA, became fast friends with a polished New Yorker by the name of Kingsley Woolworth, and played varsity field hockey.

In Tomboy Style, Mettler's witty and inviting method of storytelling leave no tomboy archetype unturned: the rebel, the sophisticate, the jock, the prep, the adventuress, the girl next door, and the naturalist are all illustrated by a bevy of historic and current images of (mostly iconic) women. The black and white photograph of a young androgynous Tilda Swinton between two horses is worth the price of admission ($32.50) alone. But don't just thumb through the pictures. There's a moment where Mettler, in describing "the naturalist," captures the purest essence of what we really appreciate in a woman...

“She is minimal, she is free, she is natural. Her skin is sun-kissed, her spirit is untamed, her beauty is as old as the Earth.”