Read Me Like A Book by Liz Kessler

There’s a lot going on in Ash’s life. College, boys, friends. Plus there’s her parents, whose constant arguing and complete inability to have a normal conversation without it turning into a bickering match is pretty much at the forefront of her mind. She’s not much of a ‘study’ girl, more of a mess-around-at-the-back-of-the-classroom girl, and her grades know it. But surely her parents will figure things out, and there’s only a year left of college and if she can just get through it then she can move on to whatever comes next. Except there’s one thing different this year: the new English teacher, Miss Murray, who pulls Ash in and makes her want to do better and makes her think maybe she is worth something after all.

I’ve been looking forward to reading Read Me Like a Book for some time, ever since author Liz Kessler first started to talk about it, over a year ago now. It’s the ultimate coming-of-age story, a book about growing up and figuring out who you are and what your strengths are, and what love is really all about. I’m not sure what I expected, but I knew from its history that it would be interesting. All of Liz Kessler’s previous books are aimed at younger readers, but Read Me Like a Book is a step in a new direction in more than just readership age. She first wrote it over ten years ago, but it was put aside because it was felt that it would be too controversial to publish at the time. Which seems pretty crazy now.

A lot of things start to go wrong for Ash at the start of the story – not only her parents’ relationship, but her relationship with her best friend starts going haywire pretty quickly, and she’s got this new boyfriend, Dylan, who should be perfect in every way, but somehow Ash doesn’t feel right about him. The only person she feels able to connect to is Miss Murray, and as the weeks slip by and she’s struggling to hold all the strands together, the idea of Miss Murray takes greater and greater hold. Ash realises she is in love, and not with Dylan.

I think what stands out for me in this story is the naturalness of it. Being 16, 17, 18, its like boiling point. There are lots of different things going on in Ash’s life and figuring out her sexuality is a major part of that, but everything else is just as real and just as major as well. Who she is in love with is the steering factor in the story, but there are other things too, and this makes the book feel all the more real. It’s not a big showpiece with a dramatic ka-boom moment or a massive reveal; it’s a progression, and that’s what life is really like and I really applaud Liz for writing her story in this way because it works in a way that is different to many other novels that fall within LGBT publishing today.

Ash is a strong young woman who, once she figures out how she feels about things, is able to voice them, with the help of her friends Cat and Robyn. Although she’s understandably nervous and a little anxious about doing so, she isn’t afraid because the environment and the world that she’s coming out to is a more open one than it was twenty years ago, and she knows it’s the right thing for her. What better role model could a young person ask for? The story is full of drama and tension, and this builds over the course of the year in which it takes place, with natural ups and downs along the way, and Ash’s character really grows too. It’s not all roses at the end, but the thing is, it doesn’t feel like an end – it feels like the beginning of a new chapter, in which things can only continue to get better.

If Liz was scared about releasing Read Me Like A Book into the wild, she needn’t be; it’s wonderful. It’s a love story, a growing-up story, a label-free story that should speak to all readers and which says good things about the world and where we are headed. Kudos.

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.

The Miseducation of Cameron Post, by Emily Danforth

The Miseducation of Cameron Post is one of the most exquisitely written and outstanding books for young adults I’ve ever read. It’s like an adult book written for teenagers, a book that treats its readers not as ‘older children’ but as mature and intelligent young people. Emotionally charged from beginning to end, it’s a coming of age novel that takes the world of bigotry to task without being preachy; a LGBT novel that is only barely about being LGBT. Rather, it is about figuring out who you are and sticking to your guns no matter what anybody else tries to tell you is right or wrong.

Cameron is almost 12 on the day she kisses a girl for the first time. It’s also the day before her parents die in a tragic car crash and when she’s told the news, her first reaction is to feel relief they’ll never find out about Irene. Her second reaction is to throw up on the bathroom floor. This is the beginning of a chain of events that will follow Cameron through the next four years of her life. A chain of events that, when she’s 15 years old, will cause her guardian, Aunt Ruth, a born again evangelical Christian with some pretty strict views on how a wholesome person should live their life, to pack Cameron off to God’s Promise Christian School and Centre for Healing. A school which deems homosexuality a sin and a sickness, and of which it is their mission to ‘cure’.

We follow Cameron through these four years, witnessing her loss, the friends she makes, the beer she drinks, the summers of swim team and hay rides and prom and building refuge and kissing boys and kissing girls. When Coley comes to town, it’s love at first sight for Cameron. But will Coley ever reciprocate Cameron’s feelings? And what will happen if or when she does?

While The Miseducation of Cameron Post is a story about sexuality, it’s also about far more than that: it’s a story about life and growing up. Her sexuality is simply one of the many different parts that make Cameron who she is, not a single defining factor. Nearly every character is as rich as Emily Danforth’s writing. I wanted to hate Ruth, but she does what she does only because she genuinely believes it to be the right thing, to be her responsibility, which is actually just very sad. And I wanted to hate Reverend Rick, but at the end of the day he’s surely just as confused as the kids he’s trying to change, yet remains true and compassionate at the same time.

Meanwhile, the themes of shame and desire and betrayal weave their way through the different characters and different events, from Cameron’s shame at her reaction to her parents deaths, to Coley’s shame at being ‘found out’, while desire pumps through almost every page – Cameron’s desire for Coley, Jamie’s desire for Cameron, Ruth’s desire to make everything ‘right’ – except, of course that what is right for one person is not necessarily right for another. But shame is something other people make you feel for yourself, for not fitting their personal profile of who you should be. And who’s to say what desire should be? For each and every one of us desire is different. Danforth expresses all of these things and more with what feels like barely any effort at all on her part, and it’s wonderful to read.

As to Cameron’s miseducation, is it the part that leads up to God’s Promise, God’s Promise itself, or the whole caboodle? And what is miseducation anyway? In the context of Cameron Post, at least, I’d say it’s a misnomer, something that is controlled by one person’s perspective, much like everyone is so set on controlling Cameron’s innate being. For Cameron, God’s Promise is her miseducation; as far as Ruth is concerned it’s the time before God’s Promise – but each and every part of it, before, during, and after, goes toward Cameron finding out what she wants and what she’s willing to do to get what she knows is right for her, no matter what box the people around try to fit her into.

Undoubtedly, The Miseducation of Cameron Post is one of the best young adult books I’ve ever read with its clear and strong-willed storytelling; a piece of writing that is just out of this world, with not one word or sentence or idea is out of place. Everyone should read it.