Tillmon County Fire

Pamela Ehrenberg, May 2009. In Ehrenberg's second YA novel, she develops the story of an arson in rural Tillmon County through the voices of eight teens. Cait is a bystander who observed a sort of confession; Aiden is born-again and out to make a point; Ben and Amelia are dating, but Ben is secretly gay and Amelia has an online flirtation with another guy; Lacey is pregnant and no one knows and she works at the hardware store where the lighter fluid was purchased; Albert is different from the other kids, probably autistic, and tries to help out where he shouldn't have; Jeremy is his twin brother and has somehow become friends with Aiden; and Rob lived in the house that's burned to the ground. The story of the arson, a hate crime directed at the new kid from New York who "started prancing and lisping around Tillmon County High School" over the winter, comes out slowly via kids' stories that don't seem to be related but eventually add up.

A story with so many voices can be repetitive or difficult to control, but Ehrenberg ably avoids these problems by sticking to a slim 171 pages and not repeating most of the action from multiple viewpoints. The book starts out just a little too slowly to make it perfect for reluctant readers, who may be drawn to it nevertheless by the red and black matchbook cover art and low page count. Recommended for all public libraries and most schools as well, although teens plotting violence can be a controversial subject.

Ash

Malinda Lo, September 2009. Twelve-year-old Ash has grown up listening to fairy tales and experiencing medical care provided by greenwitches rather than doctors, so she's surprised but not shocked when her late-night wanderings in the forest lead her to fairyland. She welcomes the escape; after her father's recent death, she's been forced to work as a housekeeper and ladies' maid for her new stepmother and two stepsisters.

Ash falls in love with a scary and elusive fairy-boy named Sidhean who is cursed to love her, and she feels herself losing control the more time she spends with him in the woods. But the same paths that lead her to fairyland also bring her to Kaisa, huntress for the king, who belongs to Ash's own world. Ash's attraction to Kaisa competes with her longing for fairyland, but she doesn't feel compelled to choose between them. Nor does she feel that one attraction is wrong, as in many coming-out tales. The twist comes when Ash, in order to meet Kaisa at a ball, must ask for Sidhean's help. In return, he asks that she become completely his, leaving her in a bind between her lovers.

The tale is set against a rich backdrop of ballgowns and class struggles, minor characters that stick with the reader (I hope there's a sequel focusing on Gwen), and the delicate balance between fairyland and real life. The love story is both vivid and subtle, and the fact that each character would survive without her partner removes this from the romance genre, although it will still appeal to readers of same. In fact, this not-romance, not-realistic, not-quite-fantasy novel will probably appeal to nearly all of your teen girls. Highly recommended. And now I'm the first and last reviewer to not mention Cinderella...oops.

Candy Everybody Wants

Josh Kilmer-Purcell, 2008. In case the shiny silver color with hot-pink lettering doesn't give it away, this book is one big gay party. In the opening scene, fourteen-year-old Jayson is shooting his Dallas/Dynasty crossover (that'd be Dallasty), starring himself as the female lead - as good a plan as any to make out with the cute neighbor boy he's cast opposite. Jayson has never been kissed, although he's quite comfortable with his identity, having "decided that he was homosexual while watching a Phil Donahue episode on the topic eight years earlier. He'd come home early from kindergarten that day because he'd gotten a stomach ache from wondering whether his Hee Haw overalls were too outré for his peers. Jayson had been sent home from school fairly often over the years, including the first day of kindergarten when he'd become inconsolably agitated that the school wouldn't change their spelling of his name from 'Jason' to 'Jayson.' He felt very strongly that he needed the extra flair to set himself apart from the other, obviously less special Jasons in the class."

Jayson's home life is somewhat chaotic; he doesn't know who his father is, his younger brother suffers from Prader-Willi syndrome, and his mom has been married eleven times. After kicking out her latest live-in boyfriend, she announces to Jayson that his father is an old movie star, Oscar Harlande, and that Jayson will be visiting him. Tomorrow. By himself. When Jayson shows up on Oscar's doorstep, he learns that Oscar, who runs an escort service for older gay men interested in sleeping with young Broadway talent, has no idea who Jayson is. Moreover, Jayson's long-time celebrity crush just happens to be living in the house.

The plot only grows more far-fetched from there, but it contributes to the soap-operatically gay smorgasbord that is Candy Everybody Wants. Recommended especially for fans of How I Got into College, Freak Show, and other big gay carnivals of teen fiction.

Josef Jaeger

Jere' M. Fishback, April 2009. Protagonist Josef is 13 in 1933 when his mother dies and he's sent to live with his uncle Ernst. Ernst is a semi-openly gay man, living with 20-year-old boy toy Rudy. Josef and Rudy become close friends, and they travel to Berlin together when Josef is offered a role in a Nazi propaganda film. Josef has known for quite a while that he's interested in boys rather than girls, and he confirms this during sexual explorations with Rudy.



Uncle Ernst is a Nazi leader, and he encourages Josef to join the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth). Josef agrees because he likes the uniform and the camping trips. He knows that Nazis are said to hate Jews, but his own observations don't match this rumor. Still, when Josef falls in love with his Jewish friend David, he keeps his Hitlerjugend membership to himself for as long as he can...

Historical gay novels are necessarily problem novels, but this one avoids the clichés of the genre. Josef is about as comfortable as he can be with his sexuality and finds several willing partners. The love story is sweet, and the plot is action-packed. Recommended.

My Invented Life

Lauren Bjorkman, October 2009. "I wish my coming out had been real so I could write about it online!" exclaims high school junior Roz after reading some stories about the newly uncloseted. Roz has a lot going on: her sister Eva, who used to be her best friend, is ignoring her....and she thinks Eva might be gay. Eva does have a boyfriend, Bryan, but he keeps flirting with Roz. Roz, in turn, flirts with Jonathan, who turns out to be actually gay. Then there's Carmen, bitchy genius and surprisingly good theatrical director, and Nico, whom no one can quite figure out. Eyeliner Andie, who describes herself as "no-sexual," rounds out the ensemble of teens putting on a production of As You Like It. The book tells the story of their complicated-to-the-point-of-farcical love lives as Roz pretends to be gay in order to find out if Eva is, and then has to figure out how to get a boyfriend despite pretending to like girls, and then has to deal with the possibility that she does indeed like girls. This is complicated by her role as Rosalind in the school play, for which she has to dress as a woman dressing like a man. Roz is not only the narrator, but the stereotypical fool who is the last one to figure out what's going on. She's always wailing, "But I don't understand!" as the other characters roll their eyes knowingly. This use of the protagonist serves both as an effective plot device and a smart parody of same.

Imagine if Paula Danziger had written a Basic Eight/Twelfth Night fanfic with help from the writers of Three's Company; that will give you an idea of the red herrings, misunderstandings, gender-bending, secret-keeping, and unreliable narration that make this book the intriguing chaos that it is. My favorite gay YA read of the year. Highly recommended.

Icarus in Flight

Hayden Thorne, 2007. Upper-class Victorian England is the perfect setting for a gay romance; opportunities abound for secret assignations, literary allusions, and parlor bitchery. Hayden Thorne takes advantage of this quite well, and often with tongue in cheek, as she explores the romantic friendship between two schoolboys.

James is from a wealthy family and is used to getting his own way in school, both socially and with the teachers. Daniel is a new boy and more middle-class; also more fearful, he seeks James's protection from bullies. Their families intertwine when Daniel's brother George becomes James's private tutor. James's sister falls in love with George, and then George dies in an accident. These events only drive James and Daniel closer together, and James dreams of a future where they can live together shamelessly. "'I'm either foolish or proud or both for choosing to disappoint everyone around me,'" he says, "'but I'd sooner lower myself in their opinion now for the sake of what's real than subject them to a lie for the rest of their lives....Can you imagine how it is when my [future] children....find out, either by accident or malice or whatnot, that their honored father was really a sodomite?'"

After a sweet romance during the boys' school days, they live together briefly in London under the fiction that Daniel is merely a houseguest. Soon, James's sister Kitty learns what is actually transpiring and asks Daniel to leave for the sake of James and the family. He does, and the two rely on the writing of elaborately constructed letters (another conceit of Victorian-era literature) until a quarrel ends their communication.

The plot deteriorates somewhat as James flees to the Continent, ostensibly to buy property but really to party in Italy, and Daniel becomes a research assistant for a series of elderly gentlemen. Both resist societal urges to marry women, and both, of course, pine after one another. Too many new characters are introduced in the second half of the book, and it's difficult for the reader to keep track of them. Suffice it to say that by the end, the two are holding hands while walking along a "muddy, desolate trail" that "was comforting and companionable in spite of their vulnerability against Nature."

Kudos to Hayden Thorne for her wickedly subtle parody of a Victorian romance; if only she'd fleshed out the endless parade of characters in the second half, the book would be more readable. As it stands, I can't recommend it for reluctant readers, but your historical romance lovers will eat it up. Sex scenes are as coy as the setting dictates, so this is a good purchase for school libraries as well as public.

David Inside Out

Lee Bantle, May 2009. Protagonist David is mostly in the closet, but sometimes he peeks out a bit. He experiments sexually with hot jock Sean, wishing he were his boyfriend, but Sean can't come out to the rest of the track team and in fact insists he's not gay -- boysex is just more convenient. David tries hard to be straight, hooking up with his female friend Kick and masturbating to the image of Mandy Moore, and in fact he may well be bi; he touches Kick's hair and thinks, "I felt a wonderful, hopeful tingling down there where it counts, where you can't fake it, even if you really, really want to." He tries buying Playboy and is interested in breasts, but he soon puts the magazine aside in favor of Iron Man and Car and Driver.

David Inside Out follows a predictable problem-novel format, with David facing bullies' accusations that he's gay, then eventually coming to terms with his sexuality. Still, formulas work if done with flair, and this one is. It has some hilarious moments, as when David attends church with his mother and finds himself "right under a nearly naked plaster statue of Jesus on the cross....I looked up, inspecting the folds of the loin cloth, trying to imagine what was underneath. This is what I had sunk to. Checking out Jesus." Sean is a stereotypical jock in denial, but Kick and Eddie are more complicated characters and round out the book nicely. Recommended for all public libraries; school librarians should note the frequent sex scenes.

Big Guy

Robin Stevenson, March 2008. This 106-page novel from Orca Soundings, an imprint for high interest/low level books for teens, is packed with issues. Derek's mom has abandoned the family; his homophobic father doesn't know he's gay; he's dropped out of high school; he's gained eighty pounds in the past year and his online boyfriend doesn't know it; and he's not sure how he feels about his job as a home health aide for Aaliyah, a defensive young woman in a wheelchair. Despite this smorgasbord of problems, the story resolves neatly without being cheesy. Derek's dad turns out to have a human side (barely); his boyfriend doesn't mind that he's fat; and he learns Valuable Lessons from Aaliyah. Recommended where other Orca titles are popular as well as in outreach settings.

Gravity

Leanne Lieberman, October 2008. This is not the average teen novel in which the author strives to make the characters as accessible as possible; nor does Lieberman create a fantasy-novel sense of otherworldly place. The author's debut novel is heavy with the language and rites of Orthodox Judaism, even including a five-page glossary of Yiddish terms in the back of the book. Narrator Ellie Gold, a devoutly religious high school sophomore, keeps kosher, blesses every meal, and won't turn on a light switch on the Sabbath. She wears skirts below the knee and beige full-coverage bras because she wants to, as opposed to her sister Neshama, who resents that their father requires this type of clothing.

The book begins with the family splitting up for the summer. While Ellie's parents go to Israel and Neshama is off to summer camp, Ellie spends the summer with her ex-Jewish grandmother Bubbie, still keeping kosher but getting more comfortable in a two-piece bathing suit. It's at Bubbie's cabin that Ellie meets Lindsay, the kind of girl she has never gotten to know at her religious school: flirty, saucy, wearing a string bikini and willing to whip it off for skinny-dipping in the lake. The two girls start flirting, and this is where we see the complexity of Ellie's character: she's sweetly dorky when she gets nervous and ends up babbling about biology. Lindsay is less complicated, bragging about the boys she's kissed. The girls rekindle their friendship back in the city, and begin a sexual relationship that feels wrong to Ellie for more reasons than her Judaism; she suspects that Lindsay is just using her, whereas for Ellie, this is everything. The sex scenes are short but hot; the subplot about Mrs. Gold's breakdown is curiously feminist without being obvious; and the contrast between the sisters is appealing. Recommended.

Nothing Pink

Mark Hardy, November 2008. In 1970s rural Virginia, Vincent knows he's gay but can't tell anyone, let alone his preacher father and even holier mother. He resorts to stealing gay porn, dreaming about Barry Manilow, and crushing out on his new friend Robert. Eventually, Robert and Vincent hook up, bonding over horses and nature walks until their sweet first kiss: "He must have brushed his teeth right before bed because he tastes like candy canes. When he breathes out it smells like Christmas." Vincent's shame weighs down the story until, in the final chapter, he's sitting at a campfire with a church group and suddenly realizes that God couldn't possibly think being gay is a sin.

It's hard to imagine today's teens relating to this story; modern queer kids are likely to have someone to confide in, even if they can't be out and proud to everyone they know. The 1970s setting gets in the way of the plot, and the Jesus talk is pretty heavy-handed. Still, the careful writing, simple plot, and low page count (109 in hardcover) might appeal to those still willing to read historical problem novels.

Down to the Bone

Mayra Lazara Dole, February 2008. Protagonist Laura doesn't identify as lesbian (or tortillera, the taunt preferred by homophobes in her Miami neighborhood), but she is in love with Marlena - she knows that for sure. When she's kicked out of her Catholic high school after a teacher discovers their love notes, and then kicked out of her home when her mom can't deal, Laura moves in with her friend Soli and her open-minded mami. Marlena quickly abandons Laura for Jesus and a Cubano husband, and Laura won't come out even to other dykes, so she's lonely for a while. In quick succession, she befriends a boi, dates a boy, gets roofied at a gay club, is held up at knifepoint by a homophobe, comes clean to her friends, and begins dating a beautiful waitress. Is this too much plot for one YA novel? Yes, but it's a big messy commotion of a book in the first place, so the drama works. Recommend to readers who liked Sofi Mendoza's Guide to Getting Lost in Mexico and The Secret Story of Sonia Rodriguez as well as your gay teens.

M+O 4EVR

Tonya Cherie Hegamin, April 2008. This first novel, poetic and daunting, tells the story of O(pal) and M(arianne), best friends in a small Pennsylvania town. They're inseparable as children, but part ways when they go off to high school, where M becomes a dissembler and O a dissenter. M forgets the kisses the girls shared under a blackberry bush in order to try out for cheerleading and become the county's first black homecoming queen, while O is a scholar who throws up emotional walls that block any other friendships from forming. Near the beginning of the book, M's body is found in a ravine, leaving O friendless and unsure of her future. Intertwined with the girls' story is the tale of Hannah, a runaway slave whose ghost appears as a warning to M. The veil Hegamin drapes between the reader and the narrator leaves this one too complex for younger and reluctant readers, but excellent for older teens and college students.

Love and Lies: Marisol's Story

Ellen Wittlinger, July 2008. Readers of Wittlinger's acclaimed Hard Love (1999) will rejoice in this new novel about Marisol, the touchy punk-rock lesbian with whom protagonist Gio fell in unrequited love. Love and Lies features a cast of gay characters including Birdie, Marisol's flamboyant roommate; Lee, small-town baby dyke with a crush on Marisol; and Olivia, Marisol's beautiful and talented writing teacher. As is typical of gaytopia novels, the action revolves around a romance rather than the coming-out process. In this case, our heroine falls for Olivia, who seems too good to be true; she showers Marisol with gifts and praises her writing, calling her "the star of my class." It turns out, of course, that Olivia is not all that she seems. The main story is set against subplots involving Birdie's neurotic boyfriend and a road trip to Provincetown. Great romance with depth and personalty.

My Tiki Girl

Jennifer McMahon, May 2008. Traditional YA lesbian problem novels tell the stories of teen girls who fall madly in love with their female friends, only to face serious consequences when parents and classmates find out. In recent years, however, the trend is toward books featuring protagonists whose sexuality is only one aspect of their complicated lives.

Despite its 2008 copyright, My Tiki Girl is a reversion to the problem novel. Its heroine, Maggie, was pretty and popular until the car accident that killed her mother. Now she wears a leg brace and feels like an outcast until new girl Dahlia asks her to join her rock band. Maggie develops a crush; Dahlia reciprocates; and the two have a secret and joyous relationship until Dahlia’s mother walks in on them half-dressed.

Until this point, My Tiki Girl, while formulaic, is charming and different. It features appealing secondary characters like Dahlia’s younger brother Jonah, who believes he is a wizard, and funny portrayals of teens smoking clove cigarettes and obsessing about Sylvia Plath. But when the girls’ secret is discovered by Leah, Dahlia’s mother, the plot takes some bizarre turns. Leah has been portrayed throughout the book as a cool hippie mom who shoplifts with the girls and creates doll alter-egos for them. Her reaction to the girls’ love affair (“Abomination! Pervert!”) is, then, wildly out of character. It doesn’t get better from there: the last chapters of the book involve a car accident that too obviously parallels the one in which Maggie’s mother was killed as well as a makeout session between Maggie and Joey, a brain-damaged boy who lives in a cave. Recommended only for libraries where authors like Nancy Garden and Julie Anne Peters are popular.

My Most Excellent Year: A Novel of Love, Mary Poppins, and Fenway Park

Steve Kluger, March 2008. Kluger's second epistolary novel for younger teens features diary entries, emails and online chat transcripts written by its three protagonists: T.C., an amorous athlete recovering from the loss of his mother; Augie, T.C.'s theatrical quasi-brother, closeted only to himself; and Alejandra (Alé), a new student whose father's career as a diplomat means she's met all the teen idols her classmates have only seen on TV. During their junior year in high school, T.C. plays matchmaker with his father and his advisor while ardently courting Alé. She, in turn, rebels against her parents' expectation that she'll major in foreign relations and follow her father's footsteps into a government career; she throws herself into the performance arts with a vengeance and becomes close friends with Augie. Augie himself discovers his sexuality and falls in love with cute jock Andy, but tragically, Andy is uncomfortable with Augie's rather fabulous self-presentation, encouraging him to go out for sports and tone himself down. This tale of coming out into the surprisingly welcome world of a suburban high school has David Levithan to thank for setting the gay-utopia standard in his instant classic Boy Meets Boy (2003). Kluger lives up to his predecessor, creating memorable characters who keep the reader rooting for them throughout their triumps, mistakes, and exploits. Recommended for all libraries with young adult collections; the sexuality doesn't go beyond kissing, so it would be appropriate for middle-school libraries as well.