Tag Archives: YA

Review | Openly Straight, Bill Konigsberg

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17934215Bill Konigsberg’s Openly Straight is a thought provoking, unique, take on the LGBTQ coming out story. When Rafe came out in the 8th grade, no one made a big deal about it. His best friend Claire Olivia had figured it out long before. His classmates stopped using words like “faggot” in jokes. His parents threw him a coming out party and his mother even became the president of PFLAG. Thing is, Rafe is tired of being the gay kid. While people don’t tease him for being gay, people still think of him as gay, and he just wants to see how it feels to be seen as just Rafe. So he transfers to Natick, an all boys boarding school, for his junior year and vows to begin afresh. It wasn’t that he was going back into the closet; he just wouldn’t mention his sexuality, and people would assume by default that he was straight. It’s a form of heterosexism — people are assumed to be straight unless they say otherwise — and Rafe wanted to use it to his advantage.

Many of the LGBTQ YA books I read are about coming out, so Konigsberg’s approach intrigued me. Post-acceptance, can society move towards a point where labels don’t matter? By refusing to be labelled “gay”, is Rafe exploring a new kind of freedom or is he denying a part of himself? On one hand, Rafe is enjoying a level of friendship with other guys that he never used to have as “the gay kid.” Free from his past, he easily becomes a popular jock, and can easily converse with his soccer teammates in the locker room shower area without having to avert his eyes. At one point, he makes eye contact with a fellow jock and realizes that, at his old school, he’d have to break eye contact within a couple of seconds, because as “the gay kid,” a prolonged connection would make his classmate uncomfortable. Being just “one of the guys” is liberating.

On the other hand, can he truly be himself when he is keeping his homosexuality a secret? At one point, a couple of his teammates start harassing another teammate for being gay. Rafe stands up for the gay teammate, but then realizes he feels like a fraud: “Who was I? How could I stand up for gay people while at the same time hiding that part of me?” Even more thought provoking, at least for me, he then says:

Straight people have it so much easier. They don’t understand. They can’t. There’s no such thing as openly straight. [67% of Kindle edition]

It’s true. I can reflect all I want about how it might be for society to move to a post-label state. I can march in the Pride Parade and argue passionately for same sex marriage. But I can never fully understand the courage it must take to come out, nor can I fully understand how it must be to live an openly gay lifestyle. As this book points out, being openly gay doesn’t even necessarily mean having a same sex partner; even just having people know you’re gay can make them treat you differently.

As Rafe recalls life at his old school, we realize that acceptance can still lead to Other-ing. His mother gave him a stack of books about homosexuality and he admits that while the material may have been fascinating on their own, that fact that his mother gave them to him made the books feel like “gay homework.” His classmates laugh easily at a couple of football players in drag, but when Rafe does it, even though he too does it for laughs, it is immediately perceived as a political statement — his classmates eye him solemnly and his teachers turn it into an object lesson about the gay movement.

I got tired of feeling isolated, okay? So I decided to tear down that barrier. I came to Natick, and I made a different choice. Not like gay is a choice, but being out definitely is one.

And you know what? That barrier did come down. I arrived here, and for the first time maybe ever, that barrier between me and so-called straight guys disappeared. [92%]

But at what cost? And what happens when Rafe falls in love with one of his friends at Natick? Can Rafe truly escape being labelled gay, and more importantly, should he even want to?

There’s a lot going on in this book, and part of me wishes the ending had been less conventional. I also wish some of the other characters were less predictable — the nerdy outcasts are interesting and show more potential of becoming true friends, while the popular jock leaders are jerks. In a book where the very act of labelling is challenged, I wish these perceptions were challenged as well.

Still, this book is sure to spark much discussion. In a class lecture at Natick, Rafe’s teacher asks if tolerance is enough: “To tolerate seems to mean that there is something negative to tolerate, doesn’t it? Acceptance, though, what’s that?” [46%] And is acceptance even enough, or does it too include a value judgement? “It’s hard to be different,” Rafe’s teacher points out, and while he does propose an alternative to both tolerance and acceptance, Openly Straight shows that it’s never really that simple. And perhaps it doesn’t have to be.

 

 

Review | Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, Benjamin Alire Saenz

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12000020This is by far one of the best books I’ve read all year. It’s a story about friendship and family and all the things people don’t say. It’s about silence, and the consequences of that silence, and it’s told in lovely, heartfelt prose. Saenz’s gift is subtlety — beneath a story ostensibly about a friendship between two Mexican American boys is so, so much more. The prose invites the reader to reach deeper, to attempt to grasp what lies between the lines, and yet the story works because there is so much more than what is within our grasp. Like Aristotle and Dante, we sense the depth of secrets the universe has to offer, and as they eventually realize, we find the answers much closer than we might expect.

One late afternoon, Dante came over to my house and introduced himself to my parents. Who did stuff like that?

“I’m Dante Quintana,” he said.

“He taught me how to swim,” I said. [p. 32]

Ari is a bit of a misfit. He has no friends, literally, and always feels out of place when talking to boys his age. His older brother is in jail, for a crime Ari has never been told; his parents never want to speak of the brother, and his father, a stoic, distant man, is struggling with PTSD from the Vietnam War. So when Ari meets Dante, a friendly, open book of a boy who is casually affectionate with his parents, it almost makes no sense for them to get along, and yet they click immediately.

In both family and friendship, while the connections that form may be easy, the relationships are never quite that simple. The contrast between the boys’ families is sharp, and Ari understandably finds it difficult to trust that Dante’s family’s warmth toward him is genuine. Then an accident alters Ari and Dante’s friendship, and forces both to face things they may have been much more comfortable keeping hidden.

And yet there are consequences to keeping silent, and the characters understand that all too well. The refusal of Ari’s parents to talk about his brother causes Ari to have nightmares, all these memories struggling to surface and yet being held back. Similarly, when Dante gives Ari his sketchbook, which he has never shown anyone else, and Ari refuses to look at it, it’s because of what Ari fears — and knows — he’ll find inside. Each time, not talking about something is the easy choice, and each time, it also turns out to be the more problematic one.

I discovered Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe at Glad Day Bookshop. I asked the bookseller for the best novel he’d read recently. Without hesitation, he handed me this book. Turns out I’d bought the last copy he had in stock, and I discovered on Twitter the next day that there was someone after me who also wanted to buy it. I read it, absolutely loved it, and recommended it to my sister. Upon reading it, she marked it as a favourite in Goodreads and did a Google search for other books by this author. That’s just the kind of book this is. So read it. I hope you like it, and if you do, pass it on.

Review | When We Were Good, Suzanne Sutherland

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17076485Remember being a teenager? Remember that all too dismissive word “angst” and the feeling that all these things you’re going through are much bigger and much more significant than adults give you credit for? Suzanne Sutherland’s debut YA novel When We Were Good plunges the reader right into that angst. I don’t know how I would have reacted to the book as a teenager, but as an adult, it did bring back memories of how it is to view the world as a teen. And in a literary landscape where teenage characters are either Joss Whedon sophisticated wits (think of John Green’s teens) or forced by dystopian societies to grow up too soon (Katniss Everdeen and her many succeeding iterations), there’s something refreshing about an author who decides to show teenage angst straight up. Protagonist Katherine Boatman is flawed, horribly confused, and desperate to “be good” without fully understanding what that means.

It takes a lot of skill to pull such a character off without letting her mess of emotions turn the story itself into an emotional mess, and unfortunately first time novelist Suzanne Sutherland hasn’t mastered it quite yet. There’s a lot going on in the novel, and a lot more that the author tries to do, and the result isn’t as tight as it could have been. That being said, Sutherland’s sense of characterization is strong — Katherine comes off troubled and sympathetic rather than melodramatic, and straight edge loud mouth Marie, who admittedly does get annoying at times, actually does sound real rather than a caricature.

This strength is sometimes overshadowed by an overabundance of detail and attempt at verisimilitude. In a scene for example where Katherine cries while grocery shopping, one can almost hear the creative writing professor advise to “show, not tell.” Yet after a couple pages of the physical symptoms leading up to the actual act of crying, I would have preferred the single line: The avocados reminded Katherine of her grandmother and made her cry.

Similarly, many conversations between characters consist of information unnecessary to the plot, and awkward in a way that feels real, but adds nothing to character development. Again, there is the basic creative writing tenet to capture “real” conversation — to be fair, the dialogue does mimic conversations we hear on between teenagers on the bus. However, for conversations on a page, I would have preferred more polish.

Toronto is very much a character in this story. Katherine’s exploration of the indie music scene takes her around the city, and Sutherland takes the reader with her, naming real Toronto streets and landmarks. The Bloor Viaduct, in particular the “Luminous Veil” suicide barrier becomes a potent metaphor for Katherine’s grief. The author hammers home the point a bit too much for the image to keep its resonance, but again, one remembers the overpowering emotion of teenage life, and certainly my teenage self probably would have latched on to that symbol as much as Katherine did.

LGBTQ stories in YA are becoming more mainstream, though still fairly rare. Even rarer, at least from my own personal reading experience, is having a straight edge character — one who stays away from alcohol and drugs and genuinely believes that’s the cool way to live. (or as kids today are more likely to say: that’s the sick way to live) In Marie, Sutherland creates an unapologetically lesbian straight edge love interest. I wish Marie had been given more nuance, and that the development of her relationship with the (sexually confused for most of the novel) Katherine was less abrupt. Still, Sutherland does make a statement by glamourizing the straight edge lifestyle, and one that invites discussion.

When We Were Good is Sutherland’s first novel, and while this does show in her writing, the novel also touches on some really important issues. What does it mean to “be good”? How can a fifty dollar bill be enough to honour a beloved grandmother’s life? How can a teenage girl deal with so many things going on, without allowing herself to be pulled under? Sutherland’s novel explores the overwhelmingly emotional nature of the teen years, as well as its amazing potential to discover new interests and new ways of viewing the world.

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Thank you to the author for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.