Luis Alberto Urrea, May 2009.  This delightful novel about a road trip that’s alternately painful, amazing, and eye-opening veers close to magical realism but never quite crosses that line.  The small Mexican town of Tres Camarones has lost most of its men to America’s promise of seasonal employment, so there’s no one around to protect the village from drug hustlers and others with malicious intent.  Three of its teenage girls, accompanied by local gay bartender Tacho, go on a mission across the American border to try to bring back some likely guys.  Peripheral missions include looking for Nayeli’s deadbeat dad, trying to find a friend in San Diego, and rescuing Tacho from jail when he’s locked up at the border crossing.  Along the way, they pick up some interesting characters and, of course, do the whole coming-of-age thing.

Urrea’s ear for dialogue and attention to the details of color and flavor lift this novel up from an otherwise-certain fate of being just another border-crossing story or just another bildungsroman.  Note “Sure enough, the she-crab had a thick girdle of eggs plastered to her shell. Tacho would be delighted. Crab roe made a paste that moved him to orgasmic delight when he smeared it on a tortilla and soaked it in lemon juice and green salsa,” or “[The wall] was covered in bright paint — an American flag, coffins full of skeletons, words, poems, a white dove. They stared at it, reading the graffiti. ‘Someone doesn’t like George Bush,’ Tacho noted.”  There’s just enough Spanish sprinkled through the book to give it a foreign flavor, yet the cultural references are to Eminem, Boy Scouts, and the Grinch. Urrea has succeeded in painting a picture of a beautiful and ugly, wild and grounded, local and foreign Tijuana and San Diego.  Highly recommended.

Charlie David, 2009.  This first novel feels autobiographical, and while I can understand the urge to fictionalize one’s life and jazz it up somewhat, I think that urge should be resisted.  Boy Midflight illustrates why: most people’s lives simply aren’t that interesting. The novel follows 19-year-old Ashley, a gay model (the author’s an actor), through a few months of clubbing and trying to get laid.  At the end he falls in love. Boring, and the writing doesn’t help; Mr. David should stick to acting.  Still, this book’s salacious cover and low page count might put it in the hands of reluctant gay readers. The cover is probably too much for most school libraries, but some publics with very high demand for gay fiction might want to pick this up.

Reviewed by guest blogger Annie Gage

Louis Flint Ceci, 2009.  An intriguing prologue hints at the secrets that are to be revealed in Comfort Me: A heterosexual couple argues in a car stopped on train tracks in tiny Croy, Oklahoma. The girl, Susan, escapes before a train collides it, but the boy, Andy, makes no effort to save himself and dies in what the town assumes was an accident.  The town’s judgment when Susan turns out to be pregnant with Andy’s child prompts her to leave town, determined that she and her child will not return.

Fifteen years later, that child, Mally (short for Malachi) returns to Croy to care for his ailing grandfather.  Initially taunted by other boys, Mally eventually makes friends with Randy, whose best friend Red resents their friendship, and Joanie, whose family has its own secrets. It is implied that Andy was gay, that Mally is gay, and that football-playing Red is gay.

Ostensibly a story about the comfort and courage that can be found in good friends, Comfort Me is an excellent example of why an intricate plot is not enough to make a good book. I believe the point of view of this book would be called Omniscient, Shifting. While Mally is clearly the central character, the narrator knows how all the characters feel and what they think, and speaks from the perspective of a number of them. This results in a lot of that fiction no-no, telling and not showing. Comfort Me is full of telling. As a result, the characters are flat and it is hard to care about them.

This book has a lot of valuable points to make about the damage that can be wrought by secrets, closets, homophobia and small-mindedness. It tells something beyond a coming out story. However, with its focus on plot and lack of attention to voice, setting, or rich sensory detail, it comes across as a promising early draft rather than a well-polished novel. I’m sorry Mr. Ceci couldn’t have revised his book a few more times and made the rest of it as rich as his plot.

Reviewed by guest blogger Annie Gage

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 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

Pat Lowery Collins, May 2009.  I read a lot of queer YA fiction, and I confess to growing weary of it sometimes; one can only read so many contemporary realistic gay teen novels, set in high schools and featuring closeted jocks, bitchy cheerleaders, and wacky theater kids.  This, then, was a breath of fresh air: it’s set in early-eighteenth-century Venice at the Ospedale della Pietá, the orphanage where Antonio Vivaldi trained young girls to sing and play various instruments.

The story is narrated by three of the girls.  Rosalba longs for life outside the orphanage, and particularly for boys.  Luisa is the diva, with a fabulous voice, a big ego, and (alone among the children) a real live mother who visits from time to time. Anetta is our lesbo heroine - she has a huge crush on Luisa that, of course, she can’t voice or even identify with, considering the era.  She knows she has a yearning to be close to Luisa but can’t relate that to the sort of desire Rosalba has for boys.  Luisa is annoyed by Anetta’s affections, but then Rosalba wisely advises that Anetta lay off, and this brings the pair closer.  It’s a lovely tale of unrequited love, and the backdrop is unique.  Highly recommended for all public and most school libraries, but do be aware that there is a rape scene that ends in a pregnancy.

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

Timothy Carter, August 2009.  This hilarious farce tells the story of Stuart, a happily out teen in a small, Canadian, intensely Christian town. Stuart’s parents and peers don’t mind that he’s gay, but all hell breaks loose - sort of literally - when his little brother catches him “going one-player on the joystick” (the funniest of the numerous terms for masturbation that the book introduces).  His parents disown him, his friends ostracize him, and only the local priest has any sympathy.  Turns out that the cause of all this is an angel fallen from heaven because he’s dared to judge onanists harshly; his superpowers give him too much influence over the townspeople. But Stuart has long practiced the art of demon-summoning in order to find out the truth about everything (God doesn’t mind if you masturbate, for example, nor that you’re gay).  He, his makeout buddy Chester, the priest, and the demon set out to recapture their town from the fallen angel’s machinations.  Funny, fast-paced, and brief, this would be great for reluctant readers as well as anyone questioning whether Christianity today really represents what Jesus would have wanted.

Liza Ketchum, 2009.  Twelve-year-old Amelia has just arrived in San Francisco in 1851, and she’s the only girl her age in town.  There are startlingly few women, too - it’s more of a center for shipping and mining, and most of the men seem to have left their wives back East. The novel covers Amelia’s first few weeks in town, as she dresses like a boy to try to fit in with a certain gang and discovers it’s also easier to dismount horses and shinny up ladders this way.  Amelia has a few too many escapades — in the least likely, she accidentally takes off in a hot-air balloon that crashes in the mountains — but this is a good old-fashioned adventure story, so that’s all right. The gay content is expertly woven into the story.  Amelia’s mom has a close friend and business partner, Estelle, who lives with the family.  She pretty clearly is Mom’s life partner as well, although this is never made explicit.  The family does have a secret, and I thought it would be revealed as lesbianism, but in fact it’s that Mom was never married to Dad, so Amelia is a “bastard.”

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.