Author: Michael Barakiva
Publisher: Macmillan Children's Publishing Group
Rating: WORTHY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.
Errata:
P14 "…you'll set to choose..." should be "…you'll get to choose…"?
p49 the word 'Capitalize' (which appears to be a reminder to the author) appears in the middle of a sentence.
The page numbering in the Adobe Reader version was bizarre. It seems like this was formatted for a Kindle or Nook, yet Net Galley offered it only in the Adobe Reader version. Page 78, for example, remained page 78 for a second page-down click, whereas p83 jumped straight to p85 with the same single click!
Additionally, in the weird-me-out stakes, there was a weird bit at the bottom of p143 where dad says that Alek has "...so much explaining to do…", then Alek says, "If you guys would just let me explain..." and then dad says "I don’t think I need an explanation for what I just saw..." Seriously? That's messed up, but at least he gets punished, if on a draconian level, for the right reasons.
The plot of this novel (which has the delightful acronym of OMG!) seems rather hackneyed and overdone at first glance: a teen who isn't aware he's gay discovers he is, has to face coming out to friends and family, and discovers the love of his life. if you're thinking of turning it down for that reason, you'll be making a mistake. Barakiva has a different tale to tell and he tells it well.
Aleksander Khederian (Alek) is forced to go to summer school and take several classes so he can maintain his honors academic status. He hates this, but in attending the class, he meets Ethan, a gay guy of whom he's long been aware, and who he met briefly not long before in an incident in the park. He seems to keep on running into Ethan from that moment on, and becomes rather disturbed as well as excited by the feelings he experiences for him.
Eventually Alek starts discussing Ethan with his best friend Becky, who has feelings for Alek that go beyond being just friends. She's the one who first articulates that Alek is gay. Becky is completely awesome. Why do I always fall in love with the main character's best friend? For me, she was the most awesome character in the whole book. She deserves a novel of her own!
Alek is evidently the last to realize his sexual persuasion, and this did seem to me to be a a bit much to believe, given that Alek is already 14 by this time. OTOH, Alek has led a very sheltered life and has had his TV time severely restricted by his parents who seem to me to be nothing short of evil, although technically, they aren’t. They are, however, improbably (and ironically!) anal about everything. The problem then is that we go immediately from Alek's denial that he's gay to him embracing it completely and at super-speed. I wasn't entirely convinced that these two behaviors go hand-in-hand.
Alek's family are Armenians, and for me there was a bit too much 'Armenian' in the story. For example, this Alek's father wants him to call him by the Armenian equivalent of 'dad'. I don’t get that, and neither, apparently, does Alek, which is why I like him. Personally, I've never understood this obsession amongst Americans to cling to their roots and at the same time cling to being "Americans"! That seems to me to be far too much like eating your cake and wanting to have it, too.
I realize that the 'Armenian factor' was important for the plot, but having it trumpeted so long and loud on every other page, and especially with the restaurant scene at the start, it was too heavy handed for my taste. I found it hard to transition from this 'obsession' to what happened with his parents later in the story, especially given how bigoted and racist (ethnicity-ist?!) they had showed themselves to be. They were also hypocrites given their attitude as stacked against their profession of being Christian. That kind of thing made it a lot harder for me to see the ending flowing naturally from the beginning; however on the brighter side of things, Barakiva did have something new and different to offer - at least in my experience! There was nothing hackneyed or overdone in how the excellent ending played out.
And to his credit, Barakiva nicely avoided a pet peeve of mine, namely that he knows there's no such thing as a tricep! Yes folks, it’s triceps, not tricep, and biceps, not bicep. He gets this and I love him for it!
The relationship between Alek and Ethan moves disturbingly quickly, but they are young teens. The scary part for me here was that I didn't trust Ethan. He's a thief for one thing and he's teaching Alek other bad habits too, like blowing off school, blowing off chores, leaving things until the last minute. In a sense he's also liberating Alek from a horribly stifling life, but I feared greatly for the outcome, and this does come back to haunt Alek. So was Ethan a bad boy to the core? You'll have to read this to find out, and I think you might be surprised at the ending. I was!
One of the most joyous (yes, joyous, you gotta problem wit dat?) things about this novel is that there's a love triangle, but it’s not your trope clichéd YA romance love triangle. It feels like a really honest and natural triangle. Instead of your trope YA main female character who can't decide between two equally worthless guys, this is a gay teen guy who has a boyfriend and a girlfriend, but the latter is in the sense of a friend who’s a girl, not a romance (or is it?!).
In conclusion, this turned out to be a fresh and interesting novel, and it made for a really great read. This is why I was willing to read past a rather naïve gay teen who's not even self-aware to begin with (let alone out!) meeting an experienced (and out) gay love interest. I have to reiterate though, that out of these three characters, the one which most interested and intrigued me was Becky. But that aside, this is a worthy read. Go read it!
