Two Boys Kissing, by David Levithan

Enter stage left: Craig and Harry. Ex-boyfriends, current best friends. Their friend Tariq follows.

Stage right: established couple Peter and Neil; new friends Avery and Ryan; lone wolf Cooper.

Eight teenaged boys; 48 hours. 48 hours in which worlds will be made and worlds will be torn apart.

Following the lives of this handful of young men over the course of just one weekend, the centre of Two Boys Kissing revolves around Craig and Harry, who are attempting to break the world record for the longest kiss, and creating quite a storm in the process. Some people are outraged that these two boys should be allowed to do such a thing in public, in front of the high school, but soon enough, they’ve also generated millions of followers on the internet and drawn supporters from all around the world.

Are Craig and Harry the centre? Or is the centre actually the narrator – or narrators? This story is not being told by the boys themselves, but by a group of watchers: the ghosts of the past. They tell the boys’ stories while telling us, quietly and poignantly, their own. At first I found this a bit strange – it took me a few chapters to get used to the juxtaposition of voices and characters, but once I did it made so much sense. Because this way, as the ghostly chorus places their pain against the relative freedoms of LGBT people today, David Levithan reminds me that the rights the LGBT community has today are absolutely brand new.

Things are a long way from being plain sailing, though. Harry’s parents are the ideal: supportive, loving, there. Craig’s parents don’t know anything – what will happen when they find out that he’s kissing a boy in front of everyone? Avery’s parents are true to him, and Peter’s too; Neil’s pretty sure his parents know he’s gay, but they can’t bring themselves to say it out loud, while Tariq is recovering from a brutal, homophobic, physical attack, and Cooper is alone, so alone and lost and ashamed.

These different boys, they are not shaped or controlled or defined by their sexual orientation; each of them is an individual, each has their own temperament and cares and concerns and interests and responses to the world and the people about them. But the way that some people respond to them shuts all of these other things out – Cooper’s father, yahoos on the street, even the radio broadcaster who launches a call-in about Craig and Harry’s record attempt. Is this really the 21st century? I don’t want to believe that there are people who still think like that, and yet I can believe it.

The chorus of voices past enables Levithan to cut away from the individual stories of our eight characters, to look upon the world from a distance, to sum up the pain and the love, to glance at the boys in love, the boys who are alone, the boys are just meeting, the boys whose parents care, and the boys whose parents hate – and then zoom in, down onto the earth and look closely, look inside our selected characters. It’s odd to think of a time when it wasn’t perfectly normal for people to be openly gay. I had forgotten (shamefully) about AIDS and about the terrible struggle that it took to get the disease recognized. And it seems completely crazy to me that it is basically only within my lifetime that any form of gay rights has been acknowledged and – even more crazy – that it’s only within the last couple of years that gay marriage has become legal.

A good friend introduced me to a technique for determining whether I was being sexually discriminated against: ask myself, would this thing have happened, or would this thing have been said if I was a guy? I think the same principal can be applied to all forms of bigotry, LGBT rights included. There is a certain amount of disgust voiced at Craig and Harry as they make their attempt for the longest kiss record – but if it was a man and woman doing it, would the response be the same? We would say it’s sweet; it’s romantic. Just because it’s two boys who are kissing doesn’t change that.

Two Boys Kissing. Yes, this is a book about being gay. The ghostly chorus, the themes, the events that take place all point toward this. But really – really – this is a book about love. Because love is the same. Love is the same whether it’s between a girl and a boy, two boys, two girls. It still feels the same. It still has the power to create and the power to destroy. Love is love, and it cannot be denied.

Reality Boy, by A. S. King

Reality Boy is the story of Gerald. When Gerald was five, his mum wrote to a TV company inviting the Network Nanny to come and work her nanny magic on Gerald and his two sisters.  Five year old Gerald did not respond well to this home invasion. Five year old Gerald’s behaviour took a nose dive, creating a name for himself that would follow him around for at least the rest of his formative years. ‘Formative years’ being the important part of that sentence. It is a not a nickname that should follow any person, particularly not through their formative years.

Today, Gerald spends a lot of time feeling angry. Everyone says he’ll wind up in prison. Everyone expects the worst from him. Problem is, when everyone expects the worst of you, it’s very hard to not fulfill their expectations. And if they only ever see the bad in your actions, what’s the point in even trying to be good? Fortunately Gerald is intelligent enough – much more intelligent than most people he’s surrounded by give him credit for – to see that he is better than other people think he is. The struggle is in trying to get everyone else to acknowledge that. Which is nigh-on impossible when you have a family like Gerald has. His oldest sister Tasha is psychopathic, but everyone (except Gerald, who knows better) pretends that’s she perfectly normal. His other sister got out as soon as she could and hasn’t called since. His mum is in a particular sort of denial that is essentially child abuse, while his dad buries his head in the sand. Oh wait, that would be alcohol-infused sand.

Gerald needs to find a way out and a way out now if has any hope of becoming a normally functioning adult. Can he move out? Can he run away? Can he wait and apply for college? In the meantime, the only means of escape that Gerald has is into his head. When things get tricky he takes a quick vacation to Gersday. Here the roads are made of candy, he gets to go to Disney World, eat ice cream whenever he wants and – most importantly – not only is there no Tasha, but everyone respects him. But just as the Network Nanny show was not real, neither is Gersday. The Network Nanny show showed only the parts of Gerald’s household that could create a TV sensation, not what was really going on. Gerald wants everyone to realize that five-year-old Gerald, the Gerald that spawned that nickname, isn’t real, but as he spirals his way through the next few weeks, who is the real Gerald? And what, for Gerald, is the real world? Is his reality the one where his sister repeatedly tries to drown him while his mother laughs from the sidelines, the one where the roads are made of candy, the one where he can run away and join the circus?

A. S. King is an exemplary writer and has built in Gerald a painfully sad and frustrated character predominantly surrounded by people who are blinded to the realities of his world. But perhaps Gerald is so wrapped up in his anger and frustration that he’s unable to see the realities of other people’s worlds? King has taken one idea, one concept – the destructiveness and unreality of reality TV – and entwined them into a multi-stranded, multi-conceptual gift of a novel that had me screaming inside over the willful ignorance of Gerald’s family. She effortlessly slips between realities, from Gerald’s ‘now’, to the Network Nanny days, to Gersday, taking us with her and with Gerald one hundred percent of the time. Can he, will he, find a way out? What will the consequences be?

A. S. King is as good as John Green and David Levithan - two writers whose fame in the UK has grown exponentially in the last year - and I really hope her UK sales will grow as fast as theirs have. This will hopefully be helped by the excellent gender-neutral cover that her publishers (Little, Brown and Company) have designed for Reality Boy, a book that is so readable you may forget to eat or sleep. Set your alarm clock to remind you to surface for a taste of your own reality on the odd occasion. But only on the odd occasion.

Every Day, by David Levithan

Every Day is the story of A. Every day, A wakes up in a new body. Every day, A has to start again, to access the body’s memories, to learn the basics of who this person is, to walk a day in their shoes, blending in with their life and their lifestyle. It’s just the way A is, the way A has always been. A has accepted that this is simply the way his/her life works, but when A wakes up in the body of Justin he meets Rhiannon, Justin’s girlfriend, and everything changes. Even as A creates the perfect day for Rhiannon, and falls in love, he/she knows that tomorrow will bring another body, another town. Will A be able to hold onto her?

This book is a thoroughly modern and thoroughly excellent love story that keeps readers questioning and asks us all who we really are. David Levithan is an author who doesn’t flinch away from subjects that for many other writers and publishers are taboo, or that are tiptoed around within carefully constructed lines. He captures all the emotions of growing up and being alive, whether of being in love or struggling with simple, every day things, all whilst subtly and quietly opening his readers to new ways of thinking. His writing and stories are open, non-judging and equal, simply showing the world as it is – or as it should be. A contemporary of John Green, Levithan’s latest offering surely cannot fail to grip and engage teen and adult readers alike.

As A jumps from body to body, not knowing why or how, he/she experiences a multitude of perspectives, of ways of being and ways of living. Boy, girl, heterosexual, homosexual, high, sober, depressed, addicted, religious, agnostic, rich, poor, beautiful, ugly, sporty, geeky, smart, slow, mean, kind, selfish, selfless. The only thing missing, really, are bodies with disabilities – A mentions being in a body that was blind once, but it’s not really something experienced within the confines of these particular pages.

The main concept that sticks out, though, is that of gender. A has no gender, and this can actually be quite difficult to get your head around. A spends pretty much just as much time being a girl as being a boy, and is equally comfortable in either shoes. In fact, it’s such a normal thing for A to switch gender on a daily basis that it isn’t even a thought, an issue, a concern. But for someone who is acclimatized to the concept of male and female, it’s very difficult to not try and pin a gender on A. My instinct is to think of A as a boy – albeit an extremely well-adjusted boy who can also think like a girl. Why is this? Is it because in the first chapter A is in a boy’s body? Because A is in love with a girl (or a being that lives inside a girl’s body)? Or because the book is written by a man?

There is also the question of whether or not what a person looks like from the outside has any impact on who they are on the inside. Most people strongly believe that appearance shouldn’t matter, but more often than not, when it comes to practice over principal it can be very hard not to take the outside of a person into account.

Once Rhiannon learns A’s truth, they begin to meet every few days or so, A in a different body each time. Although she knows who A is inside, she naturally responds very differently to each body that A shows up in. Studies have shown that the chemical make-up of a body – pheromones, etc – do influence how we react to different people, but Levithan’s attempt to strip all of this away and focus just on the personality is really interesting. Rhiannon, for instance. I don’t recall Levithan ever giving us a full description of her – I couldn’t tell you what colour her skin is, her hair, whether she is short tall, large or skinny. Instead, Levithan shows her to us through abstract details – the emotions she exudes through her body language, the type of shoes she is wearing. Not knowing her physical description makes her no less real to me as a reader, no less interesting or emotional or worthy.

In essence, Every Day is a love story. But there are many other questions here waiting to be answered. What makes us human? What makes us the same and what makes us different? A doesn’t have a body, so does this mean he/she isn’t human? As the story progresses, A and Rhiannon not only begin to face some tough decisions about their relationship, but A is pursued by Nathan, a boy who’s body A lived in for a day, and the mysterious Reverend, both of whom begin to question who A is, and what he/she is capable of. Because, after all, is A the only person to exist like this? What if there are others?

A does show us that bodies have a mind of their own sometimes, that a body’s chemical make-up has an impact on who we are and what type of personality we might have – it’s not the be-all and end-all, but it’s a contributing factor.  Personally, I do believe this is the case, but if A does not have his/her own body then how has he/she become the person he/she has become? Perhaps only because A knows that every body responds to the world and to it’s own chemical structure in a different way; perhaps the fact that A has experienced 6000 different bodies is as much of a determining factor to who he/she is as the experience of just my one body is in who I am. What, then, does living in 6000 different bodies mean? Having tasted a little bit of everything does this make A the most average a person can be?

A book that kept me turning the page to find out who A would be the next day, and the next day, and the next day.



[Interested in gender equality? Please read Maureen Johnson’s ‘coverflip’ discussion on her blog and gender coverup article in the Huffington Post, where she highlights questions surrounding boy books, girl books, boy covers, girl covers, and gender misperceptions.]

Ask the Passengers, by A S King

After a great deal of mental resistance, I recently joined twitter (follow me @bookythought), and one of the first twitter feeds I looked at was John Green’s, on which he had posted the following comment: “People kept telling me @as_king's books are kinda like mine, but having read ASK THE PASSENGERS, I can report that in fact hers are better.” Which seemed like as good a recommendation as any.

Why oh why have I never heard of A S King before?

Ask the Passengers tells the story of Astrid Jones, a regular teenage girl growing up in a small American town, but with a secret. Actually, that’s not true, it’s not a secret. Rather, she’s in the process of figuring out who she is and who she wants to be, and her secret isn’t a secret because she’s not even sure if it’s true yet or not. She needs to reach a certain point of acceptance about it before the rest of the world should get a look in; this is, after all, her life and her feelings. The secret? She’s falling in love with a girl.

Astrid is smart and sensitive and she knows her own mind. She knows the difference between right and wrong; she knows how it feels to be pushed into things she doesn’t think are right and to do things she doesn’t want to do. She’s just trying to stand up for herself, but everyone else seems to think their expectations should come first. This is why, when she needs to escape the construct of her world, she sends her love to the passengers on the planes that fly overhead – she has so much love to give, but no-one else, right now, to give it to.

In a very John Green-esque way, King has intertwined a raft of interesting ideas through Astrid’s story, particularly that of the Socratic paradox, an idea introduced through Astrid’s humanities class, along with Socrates’ Allegory of the Cave and, as the ending draws near, the concepts of perfection and perception. Of the Socratic paradox - ethical constructs that seem to conflict with common sense - Astrid says,

“The only way to disprove something that defies common sense is to ask why. Why would people desire evil? Why are people evil? Don’t they think they are doing good from their perspective? What is evil then, anyway? That’s exactly the type of thing Socrates was after. Making people think so they could find the truth.” (pg. 85)

And this is what Astrid wants too: to make people think. She wants to challenge the things that might otherwise be accepted as a given; she doesn’t want to put a label on herself, and why should she? Especially when it’s only others who will use that label; especially in a town where everyone likes to know everyone else’s business. What does it mean if she gay? Why does it have to mean something big, something groundbreaking? Why can’t it simply mean that she’s fallen in love?

It’s true that King’s writing has a similar feel to John Green, as do a whole raft of contemporary American authors who are just starting to trickle through to the UK book-waters (David Levithan, Maureen Johnson, to name just two). Is she better? I don’t think you can say that any one of these authors is better than the others; rather, they each have a way of writing and tapping into the inner conscious in a way that British authors don’t quite match – it seems to be a style that is currently unique to the American culture, which is perhaps why it feels so fresh and exciting when these wonderful books arrive on British bookshelves. It’s like the teen version of ‘The Great American Novel’. And it turns out that King is a Printz Honor author, a prize that’s the rough US equivalent of the UK’s Carnegie Medal. Mental note: must read other Printz Honor authors.

King and Astrid together achieve what they set out to do: make people think; make readers think. And it’s achieved in a really beautiful way. It’s a story that is almost poetic; it flows and undulates, full of both hard edges and soft corners for the reader to work their around. Astrid’s family consists of a permanently stoned father, a hyper-intense mother, and a little sister who is desperate to fit in. Their behavior toward her, particularly her mother, is hideously caged and resistant. Following a particular incident about half way through the book, Astrid’s parents ask her if she is gay, but Astrid is unable to answer – not because she’s afraid of saying that word, but because she simply doesn’t know the answer yet. Instead of listening and being supportive, her mother’s response is, why are you doing this to us? Why are you lying? It riled me, made me want to get up on my soapbox, to support Astrid, to feel for her in a million different ways.

As other people’s words and stories and actions get blown out of proportion like Chinese whispers, all of a sudden Astrid is the bad guy in the room. Everyone wants someone to blame for the fact that – *shock, horror* – there are gay people in the town. And in this small-town world, Socrates’ Allegory of the Cave  seems even more relevant:

“People chained in a cave are only able to see a wall. The wall has shadows cast from a fire they can’t see. They guess at what the shadows are. Their entire reality becomes these shadows.” (pg. 111)

People only see what they want to see, or what they think they know. It’s an almost impossible ask, sometimes, to get them to consider a new reality. Ultimately, I don’t think Astrid quite gets her parents to understand the new reality she is trying to present to them: that you don’t have to be one thing or the other. But she does find her own way around the mine, a way to be herself and to get them to accept her. She uses a label whilst simultaneously turning that label on its head, which is just brilliant.

Ask the Passengers is wonderful reading, compulsive and thoughtful, and I found myself sitting up until two in the morning reading, simply because I could not put the book down. And then the next day I went out and ordered King’s Everybody Sees the Ants, because I want to hear more of what this author has to say about the world.

Dash and Lily's Book of Dares, by David Levithan and Rachel Cohn

Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares is a classic, modern, John Green-esque book that tells the story of two strangers in New York meeting and learning a little about each other through words. Told in alternating chapters - one from Lily’s perspective, one from Dash’s perspective - we learn how Lily leaves a moleskine notebook on the bookshelf in her favourite bookstore with a quest written inside for whoever finds it. That someone turns out to be Dash. After completing the first dare, which is supposed to culminate in him handing over his email address, Dash decides that two can play at this game and, instead of following instructions, sets Lily his own dare.

It’s interesting to think about because as the reader we get to know both Dash and Lily quite intimately, seeing their daily activities and hearing their innermost thoughts, and so it’s hard to remember that, as the story begins to grow, each of them knows the other considerably less well than the reader does. Dash and Lily are actually quite chalk and cheese: Lily loves Christmas and the fanfare it involves; Dash hates it. Lily is chirpy and full of beans; Dash’s nickname quickly becomes ‘Snarly’. And, of course, as they communicate only through dares and the written word, neither knows what the other is really dealing with in their life. This is perhaps why, when they finally meet, it doesn’t exactly go according to a romanticist’s plan. The romanticist in this case being not only Lily, but me. And this method of communication is also why, when they finally meet, I was surprised - disappointed? - that it didn’t go exactly according to a romanticist’s plan. Because, of course, I knew far more about them than they actually knew about each other.  This, however, is the beauty. It made me think; it made me question; and it made me reassess what I thought I knew about Dash and about Lily. In other words, it was made more real and realistic.

Set over the Christmas and New Year period, complete with snow and a dancing reindeer movie, this is obviously a good book to read in December. The story itself, though, will stand the test of reading at any other time of the year as well. It’s clever and funny - and gets funnier as the story goes on. Especially when Dash is unfairly labelled as a child attacker on a mommy website following an unlucky incident with a snowball. The fallout from this incident resonants into the final pages of the book in a rather wonderfully orchestrated final showdown between Dash and Lily themselves. Will they get it together or not? Either way, Lily comes out of her shell, and Dash does too, kind of.

David Levithan is a fairly prolific writer and is one of those authors whose name seems to crop up quite often yet who doesn’t seem to have become a UK household name in quite the same way that other teen authors have, like John Green - an author with whom Levithan has actually collaborated, on Will Grayson, Will Grayson. A similar tale resides with Rachel Cohn who, sadly, seems to have written more novels than are actually available in the UK. Having not yet read any of Levithan or Cohn’s other works, I don’t know exactly how well they’ll compare to John Green; after reading Dash and Lily, I’m sure  they’ll be good, but perhaps not quite as good - as lyrical - as John Green.

As for Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares, it’s a lovely read, something a little different; something a little romantic without being sweet and sickly; a new take on an old idea without trying too hard. Kind of real and fanciful all at the same time; a touch of a fairytale, but tempered by normal life.