Cris Beam, March 2011. Beam wrote the excellent Transparent: Love, Family, and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers, a nonfiction look at MTF kids in LA.  I couldn’t put that one down, so was delighted to hear about Beam’s foray into YA fiction.

It didn’t disappoint. I Am J is narrated by (obviously) J, once Jenifer, a seventeen-year-old FTM kid living in Manhattan and going through all the normal teen stuff - a crush on his best friend, parents who just don’t understand, bullies - but with an extra knife in his heart: he has a vagina.  He’s not sure how to tell his parents, and he can’t tell Melissa (the aforementioned best friend) either, mostly because she’s mad at him for kissing her when she was asleep. He knows that was wrong, but he just wanted to kiss a girl.

J has been ditching school quite a lot, partly because of the bullies and constant shouts of “dyke” (if they only knew!), but mostly because he wants time to be who he is.  Some of this is spent searching the web for information on how to get testosterone shots; some is spent at Village coffee shops, where the cute girls just think he’s a cute boy. Then his parents find out about the school-skipping, and the family decides J should move in with Melissa for a little while. This is when J starts going to therapy (required to get the testosterone) and starts taking classes at a school for gay and trans kids, and learns new words like “intersex” and “cisgendered.”  The book gets a little clichéd from here, as J learns to Be Himself by hanging out with arty wild kids, and his Redeeming Hobby (photography) saves the day in the end.  Still, the book is realistic (mostly), and handles the big life changes without the melodrama of a Julie Ann Peters.  It’s also hard to put down, making the reader really care about J and what will happen to him next.  Highly recommended for public libraries and many school media centers.

Reviewed by guest blogger Jill Maddox

Steve Berman, 2007. I don’t normally read horror stories, but after meeting Steve Berman at Dragon Con in 2009, I decided to give this book a try. I have always been sensitive to anything remotely paranormal or creepy. I had a hard time sleeping several nights. I pushed through the insomnia and terror and fell in love with the book and the ending. The truth that rings through out the book will soothe the souls of the readers., young and old alike.

After suffering a personal crisis, I opened the book and read it again, cover to cover in one day. The second time around I found the book to really be a romance wrapped in black eyeliner and dusty second hand clothing, sprinkled with gay romance and lonely ghosts.

A must read for anyone looking for something more substantial in the young adult literature market.

Reviewed by guest blogger Jill Maddox

Dale Peck, 2009.  Sprout Bradford is a gay teenager with green hair, an alcoholic dad, and a trailer for a home, all smack in the middle of Kansas.  He’s fairly well accepted at school, maybe because he owns all his oddities rather than trying to hide any of them.  Or maybe it’s because he really is pretty normal next to Ruthie, his best friend, whose scrawniness, wedge-cut hair, and eighties obsession are just a few of her defining quirks.

For the first half of the novel, Sprout and Ruthie are inseparable, except on Saturdays when Sprout goes to visit his (also alcoholic) teacher, who’s prepping him for a statewide essay contest.  This involves a lot of practice writing, excerpts from which provide much of the info about both Ruthie’s and Sprout’s backgrounds.  But by the second half, Ruthie has been summarily replaced by Ty.  Ty is a legitimately weird new kid with family problems of his own, and soon he and Sprout are, if not boyfriends, at least sharing secrets and hooking up regularly.

And then there’s Ian Abernathy. That’s the name of the now-stock character in any gay teen novel: the outwardly-homophobic-but-secretly-gay jock.  He taunts Sprout early on with the usual slurs, but ends up making out with him, literally in a closet, repeatedly throughout their shared adolescence.  Only Ty puts an end to this - well, and Ruthie, who ends up with Ian.

The main characters of Sprout are complex and appealing (except for Ian), and the supporting cast has depth. The plot is coming-of-age, but who doesn’t like a good bildungsroman? Highly recommended.

Published simultaneously in ALA’s GLBT Round Table Newsletter.

Reviewed by guest blogger Kaye Moore

Alex Sanchez, 2007.

Reviewed by guest blogger Jonathan Drescher

Rigoberto González, April 2009.  Meet the Fierce Foursome - Maui, Trini, Isaac, and Liberace - the founding members of The Mariposa Club.  To memorialize their final year in high school, the boys set out to create Caliente Valley High School’s first LGBT organization.  Their hope is to create something that future students like themselves can belong to, and to let the four of them leave something important behind before they all go their separate ways.  The first semester of their senior year is filled with hardship for the four gay boys, even as they try to get the Mariposa club started.  In a small, relatively intolerant town, life isn’t easy for those who are different.

The story is narrated by Maui, and through his eyes we follow the Fierce Foursome as they deal with:

-Family relationships (some even abusive)

-Community homophobia

-Life path decisions (college, work, love)

-High school

-Violence and tragedy

The voice of the novel rings true through most of the narrative.  The reader gets involved in the lives of these young boys and the secondary characters in their lives.  It speaks well to both the isolation and camaraderie of this tiny group as the only boys who have come out in their high school.  Some of the conflict seems cliché — perhaps even a little forced — but it serves to help the novel hit on many different problems this age group could face, especially as an LGBT teen.  Recommended for high school readers and above.

Reviewed by guest blogger Jonathan Drescher

Cheryl Rainfield, March 2010.  This traditional problem novel manages to be both gruesome and cookie-cutter.  It addresses teen Kendra’s cutting, her parents’ financial problems, her crush on sexy and sassy Meghan, and her quest to remember who raped her when she was a child.  Anyone who’s ever read anything about childhood sexual abuse will be unsurprised to learn that Kendra’s father is the culprit; there should have been some sort of red herring or, conversely, creepiness in the dad from the beginning, but there isn’t. That was a mistake.

The relationship with Meghan, the most appealing character, is sweet. What isn’t is the Teacher as Savior trope, in this case (as in so many others) related to Art as Savior.  Yes, Kendra’s escape from cruel reality is drawing, and the In-Tune Teacher is her art teacher. This book could be a guide to the formula of a problem novel.  It also might just resonate with the many readers who are interested in these themes.

Reviewed by guest blogger Nari Avanesian

Drew Ferguson, September 2008. The Screwed-Up Life of Charlie the Second is about Charles James Stewart, Jr.  Charlie has never quite fit in at his high school in a small town in Illinois. Tall and socially awkward, Charlie is the epitome of the typical school nerd. While his parents fight, Charles plays soccer to keep himself out of the house and out of their hair. Never formally accepted by his teammates, Charlie has a hard time trying to fit in anywhere until a new boy at school enters into Charlie’s life and changes everything. With a wry and self-debasing sense of humor, Charlie takes us through three hectic months of his life in a diary-style novel.

Told through the perspective of a whiny, confused, caring, naïve and willful teenage boy, the book starts immediately with Charlie being open about being a gay teen. It isn’t so much as a coming-out story as it is a growing-up story. There are many, many issues and conflicts that Charlie encounters through a short time in this book. He deals with bullies, an overbearing and pushy father, a hot-tempered boyfriend, pending divorce, euthanasia, relationships, homophobia and more. Although there were moments of homophobia throughout the book with his schoolmates, I felt that Charlie was the scapegoat more for being a nerd than for being gay. Charlie’s wit and introspective narration made his story easy to follow, and easy to understand. He is a character that a lot of teens will relate to, gay or not.

While the book was a very engaging and amusing read, I felt that there were too many hot-topic issues covered in a short span of time and too neatly wrapped up by the end of the book.

Reviewed by guest blogger Nari Avanesian

Sara Bell, June 2009. This book contains the following:

• a gunpoint confession
• a nasty eulogy
• a sassy old lady with a shotgun
• a dead teenager who (a) writes a will and (b) in it, actually leaves someone a key to his safe-deposit box, which turns out to contain $42,000 in cash, which further turns out to be the reapings of the blackmail of those with whom he has gotten naked while underage
• a school principal who pimps out teenage boys on the side
• true love forever between white boys who call each other “sexy thang”
• anal sex as a sign of commitment
• “Answer me, damn it!”
• a kid at the prom confessing to murder and then jumping off a balcony to his death
• an unnecessary additional forty pages at the end to introduce a weird tacked-on subplot featuring Megan, the teenage fag hag, almost bleeding to death of a miscarriage and dumping her witless boyfriend from her hospital bed, and then becoming prom queen two weeks later

Kirstin Cronn-Mills, September 2009.  “It was a great kiss, a fantastic kiss. I loved it. I can’t deny it. But I’ve had no desire to kiss her since then. What if I want to kiss some other girl instead? I think Angelina Jolie is smoking hot, so am I a lesbian for saying so? Or am I really bisexual, like Amanda said? Brad Pitt is just as hot as Angelina Jolie, so maybe I want to do it with guys and girls. If those two ever volunteer, I’ll take them up on it.” 

So go the thoughts of sixteen-year-old Morgan.  She’s often confused, and no wonder; she has a steady boyfriend, Derek, but can’t see a future with him, but she does think he’s hot.  Then there’s Tessa, the school lesbian, who kissed her once and she can’t stop thinking about it.  And then there’s Rob, the assistant manager of the grocery store where she works, who might be her soulmate if only he knew. And more than romantic trouble is perplexing Morgan; her dad’s an alcoholic, her stepmother’s an enabler, her mom is dead, someone needs to be there for her younger brothers, her best friends are ignoring or taunting her, and she’s just found out a terrible secret about her only ally, her grandmother.  Luckily, she has an outlet for her stress that doesn’t involve cutting or drugs: the title refers to her tendency to go up in the mountains and scream out her problems, which calms her down.

Morgan is well-developed, as are the minor characters; it would be easy for Derek, for example, to come across as a doofus, but instead the reader is partly rooting for him even knowing he’s not the right one for Morgan. The little brothers are very minor characters but both memorable. Morgan’s confusion over her sexuality is realistic, and given the rural community in which she lives, the homophobia of many kids at school makes sense too.

My favorite part: we never learn the name of the grocery store where Morgan and Rob work.  Instead, Morgan refers to it by a different fake name every time: Grocery Galaxy, Food For Freaks, and more.

John Green and David Levithan, April 2010. This excellent novel is written by Green and Levithan in alternating chapters, each writing from the POV of a different kid named Will Grayson living in the Chicago suburbs.  Will #1 is the kind of kid who tries to stay under the radar.  This strategy is both aided and harmed by his friendship with the gay-gay-gay, fat-fat-fat Tiny Cooper.  Will #1 is trying to decide whether he likes super-indie-girl Jane or not.  Will #2, who runs into #1 in a porn store neither of them planned to enter, is a gay kid in an online relationship that he later discovers is a fake, and he falls pretty hard for Tiny.

Levithan is one of my favorite authors ever ever ever, and Green is excellent as well.  The dialogue is crisp, the characters are creative and real and awesome - even Tiny, and it’s pretty hard to write an original superfag character who loves musicals (it helps that he hates “Over the Rainbow”). The voices Levithan and Green choose for the two Will Graysons aren’t as divergent as I would have liked, so I sometimes got them a little confused, but that is a minor quibble. Highly recommended for all public and high-school libraries.