Julie Anne Peters, 2009.   I really, really want to like Julie Anne Peters’ books.  I try again with each new one, but I just can’t do it.  Rage follows the pattern of her 2003 Keeping You a Secret: it starts out as an interesting, realistic problem novel, but soon deteriorates into a melodramatic parody of same. 

Rage is narrated by Johanna, a good girl in unrequited love, from a distance, with bad-girl Reeve.  Reeve has a mysterious and scary home life and has slept with every girl in school.  When the two finally get together, Reeve repeatedly warns Johanna that she’s no good for her, and eventually starts hitting her.  Johanna’s lies to cover up her unexplained bruises and cuts ring painfully true, but her naïveté does not. She can’t fathom, for example, why Reeve and her twin brother might possibly have two different last names; she can’t even come up with one possibility. 

Still, so far so good, as same-sex relationship abuse is tragically real, and it’s great for Peters to point that out to girls who might think that having a girlfriend frees them from the possibility of dating violence. But then the book goes into that melodramatic downward spiral.  Reeve’s stepfather stabs her mother, then slits her brother’s throat.  It feels tacked-on and wrong; the book didn’t need to go there.  The violent relationship between the two girls was enough.

Michael Cart, ed., 2009.  The long break since my last post reflects my difficulty with finishing books of short stories.  I have trouble getting into them; they’re just too short and I don’t have the chance to identify with the characters.  This isn’t the fault of the renowned list of authors (I was familiar with ten of the twelve), but it did take me a while to finish the book.

There’s been tons of buzz about David Levithan’s contribution, “A Word from the Nearly Distant Past,” but although I may well be Levithan’s biggest fan, I’m not sure this even qualifies as a story. It’s more of the kind of speech your sixties-feminist mother might give you about how young women today have it so easy because of the ground she broke at protest marches back in the day.  And while I agree it’s important to remember the past, I wonder how teens feel about this story.  Does it really speak to them?

I felt the same way about Gregory Maguire’s 117-page….what? novella?  Again, not a story and not for teens.  I loved it actually, but I’m 34.  Am I not giving teens enough credit when I say that they might not want to read this book about men in their forties?  Yes, there are flashbacks to college, when Blaise and Faroukh began their relationship, but most of the book is about men the age of teens’ dads.

Rounding out the trio of really-for-adults contributions is Ariel Schrag’s hilarious comic about a day at Dyke March: meeting up at the BART station, looking at naked girls, indulging in tequila and pot, “us[ing a] rich fag’s bathroom,” and drunkenly texting her girlfriend on the East Coast.  Probably my favorite story in the book, but - say it with me - will teens relate?

The rest of the contributions did seem to speak to teens. Jacqueline Woodson wrote a touching if plotless vignette about a little boy crossing gender borders as well as racial ones; he’s half-black and half-white and was born a girl.  Francesca Lia Block’s story about a pair of troubled teens who make a connection online (one cuts, one has gender issues) was strong, as was Julie Anne Peters’s story in two voices about a pair of girlfriends having sex for the first time.  Sweet and sexy, this is the best thing Peter’s ever written. Emma Donoghue’s epistolary story reminds teens of the bad old days when gay people weren’t allowed to get married, but unlike Levithan’s, succeeds in doing this in a way that teens will understand: the letter-writer is a non-bio mom who got shafted during a custody dispute, and the letters are to her estranged daughter.

Eric Shanower’s comic about a genie granting a young boy’s wish not to be gay and Ron Koertge’s story about…becoming a dog because his father treats him like a dog? were too weird for me but may appeal to teen fantasy readers. William Sleator’s exploration of love between a Thai boy and a white man was moving if a bit predictable.

That’s ten.  I’ve saved the best for last.  Margo Lanagan is a genius, and her story about a young boy revealing a secret affair between a girl and a robber features gorgeous language and an ending I didn’t see coming.  I had never heard of Jennifer Boylan before, but loved her “The Missing Person,” about a little trans girl borrowing her sister’s clothes and sneaking out to the town parade. “It was the first time in my life I had ever felt the sun on my face as a girl,” says the narrator. “I felt like someone who had been released from jail, like someone who’d spent her whole life in a prison only to be unexpectedly paroled, at the age of fourteen, and set loose upon the world.” When a magician picks her out of the audience to act in the classically superfemme role of his assistant, she’s embarrassed about moving from the sunshine to the spotlight, afraid people can tell she’s not like all the other girls. The story is deepened by a parallel narrative about an exchange student who disappeared long ago. Turns out she stepped on insulation in the back of a closet and fell within the walls of her host house, where no one could hear her cries.

So: two excellent stories, many good ones, some out of place, a couple I wasn’t feeling. That’s pretty standard for a short-story collection.  Still, this one probably deserves the attention it’s getting, thanks to the big names and the efforts to reduce tokenization; there were two comics in the mix, and that oft-ignored T in LGBTQ is fully represented.  Definitely worth buying for your library, but consider getting an extra copy for the adult fiction collection.