Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan

[lightreads]

Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I guess if I were the sort of person who bought books for young teens I cared about, I'd get them this one. But I don't buy books for teens because I generally don't care about them. (The teens, I mean. I care about books plenty.) And that, I think, is the problem.

It's a slight, cute LGBT high school romance, set in an island of utopian well-adjustment. The quarterback is also the homecoming queen, the narrator came out to his parents at the age of five, and their only reaction was to think it was cool that he'd learned a new word, that sort of thing. It's basically saying, 'what if gay kids got to have romances like their straight peers, where the big question is does he like me? and not will we be relentlessly tormented until hanging ourselves in the garage is the only way out we can see?' It's a gay teen romance without homophobia or identity insecurity (at least for the narrator), and it's about how in this world he's just a kid like any other, with a silly crush and bad romantic judgment and sweet, mixed up friends.

Except, you know, I don't care about teenagers. So for me, the answer to the question -- what do you get when you write a gay teen romance without the gay angst? -- is that you get teen romantic angst. And that's boring.




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Comments

[cahn]

Well, I don't know; I care about (at least a small set of) teenagers a lot, but... caring about teenagers and caring about books means that I tend to buy books for teenagers that I find, you know, interesting. Which generally means no teen romantic angst of any sort whatsoever, or as little as I can get away with, anyway...