Author: Emily M Danforth
Publisher: Harper Collins
Rating: WORTHY!
In other reviews where I've railed against the use of first person PoV, I've always said that once in a while it works, because the writer knows what she's doing and can carry it off. This is one of those rare and welcome exceptions. I'm not saying that it couldn't have been done in third person. It could, but whether that would have been a different novel or pretty much the same, we'll never know. Just let me leave it here: that I'm grateful that this writer didn't screw-up a great story like this one turned out to be.
The other trick to successful novel-writing (aside from figuring out how to get the word out about your own effort when you've chosen not to sell-out your work to the mega-bucks of Big Publishing™) is how to grab your readers on page one. Unless you're a comfortably established writer, you usually cannot afford the risk of asking them to bear with you for a page or two, much less a chapter or two. You have to corral them fiercely on page one, and Emily Danforth did that with a vengeance with me. I don't know what it was. I wish I knew, but she did it and I was hooked.
A quick note on the cover: it has nothing to do with the novel, but this isn't the author's fault. It's one of those Big Publishing™ covers where the artist evidently either never read the novel, or simply didn't have any interest in truly representing it with any degree of industriousness or integrity. Don't judge this (or any book) by the cover. Judge it by the brilliance of the interior. On that score, also please note that this YA novel has mild drug and alcohol use, moderately explicit sexual situations, and bad language. It doesn't bother me because that's how people actually are, but it may bother those who like their stories sanitized.
Cameron Post is your every-day young teen on the threshold of entering high-school, finding her way in the world, enjoying her summer, when there's this almost-accidental-but-perhaps-not kiss between her and her best friend Irene. Since Irene is leaving town that fall, it never really goes anywhere other than another peck or two, but even though Irene isn't sure what she really wants at that point and later evidently decides to travel a different path in life, along comes Lyndsey shortly afterwards. She's a fellow competitive swimmer, but at a different school. This new relationship goes somewhat further, but not much beyond second base.
Living in a small Montana town, and having lost her parents to a motor vehicle accident, Cameron, Cammie, Cam falls under the wing of her religiously-deluded aunt Ruth. Ruth isn't a bad person. She's rather nice and decent, and obviously cares for Cam, but she's been cruelly blinded by theistic zealotry and evidently isn't smart enough to see through it, so Cam has every reason to hide her predilections from everyone, particularly those who can harm her or who control her life at that point, and she does fine at this until along comes Coley Taylor.
Unlike With Irene and Lyndsey, Coley makes no overt moves, so Cam is never sure if what's going on is all in her own mind, or if there's something in Coley that wants to express itself to Cam on a very personal and intimate level. Coley has a boyfriend and she makes Cam get one - her best friend Jamie - for the school prom. It's at the prom where Jamie confronts Cam about her attraction to Coley. There's an minor altercation, tears, and then Jamie kisses Cam and she responds, but as this pseudo-relationship continues, she learns that she's not deluding herself about her orientation at least, or about where her heart and mind is at.
This is where things really start to move, because Coley isn't shy about experimentation even as she appears to be freaked out about what her true orientation might just be. And all around them, the cold, small, lonely, distant, religiously-warped town is watching. Salvation/Damnation is at hand, however, when Coley gets her own apartment so she doesn't have a forty mile commute to school each day from her parents' ranch, and the two plan to spend the evening there.
This novel wasn't all plain sailing. I know! Aren't I cruel to say not a word about what went on in that apartment that night?! You gotta get the book to find out. I promise you that if you like this kind of novel at all, then you'll likely love this particular work. One of the great things about a story like this is that it's truly my idea of a romance - not necessarily a gay one, but a romance between two people - the gender is irrelevant. This kind of novel is far, far better and more deeply romantic than almost any novel which actually bills itself as a romance.
But I digress. As I mentioned, I had a couple of issues, which were really varieties of the same issue when you get down to it. I was reading this on my smart phone because Apple is doing its damnedest to keep me from reading anything that I actually want to read on its iPad! Until I figured it out with some timely help from a good friend (thanks, LL!), the so-called ease-of-use corporation was making me work my tail off to creatively get around something which Apple claims is designed to facilitate creativity. Trust me they LIED! The smart phone, huge as the screen is, is still quite small. Even at 12cm by 7cm (~4.75in by ~2.75in), it's too small to read some things which authors include in their books, and from a writing perspective in this multi-device, multi-media era, this is worth keeping in mind.
In this case, the things were: a letter written by Jamie to Cam and left in her room, a post card sent by Lyndsey from Alaska, and a tri-fold church leaflet which plays a part about half-way through the story. These things were included in the book in the form of images. The post card was just large enough to be legible, but neither the letter nor the tri-fold were, and they didn't really lend themselves to enlarging by the old finger-split maneuver wither, which is normally a really cool thing to be able to do. The letter enlarged some, but the tri-fold not at all. The issue was that the author assumed that both of these would be readable, and so never reproduced the text in the body of the novel.
This is one case where you need something the size of a pad (I checked the images on an iPad and they look good and are quite legible), or you need the actual print book in order to get everything there is from this novel. I've noticed this "image problem" in other things I've read on my phone and I find myself wondering how these images would look in another format. I'm not in a position to check that, but it's a pity our technology isn't quite where it needs to be, even after all these years.
I digress. Again. As you will know from the blurb, things come crashing down - in an interesting way, too - and Cam is sentenced to the gulag - a Christian fundie school where she will serve two terms at least, getting a brief parole only for the hols.
Despite my love for this story and many of the characters, there were still parts of it which I felt lacked oomph, or which in one way or another betrayed a character, or which were not as I'd thought they'd be (and don't confuse that with what sometimes I felt they ought to have been!). I was surprised, for instance, that it took fifty percent of the novel for Cam to get inducted into the "de-gaying" school (or is that gay-bashing school?). I'd thought that would swing by much earlier. This isn't a problem as it turned out, because the first fifty percent of the novel was really engrossing for me. This erroneous idea was something which I'd evidently derived from the blurb, but which wasn't actually in there to begin with.
In contrast, the part where she was in the deluded Christian cult induction facility, which is where I was expecting fireworks and fun, or at least some determined subversion going on, turned out to be completely flat. This was where the oomph was lacking for me. It was, however, interesting, and I can understand (and I support - for what it's worth!) the author's decision not to paint this story in broad sloppy strokes of black and white. That was way smart, but for her to tame Cammie, to effectively neuter her in fact, at this point was wrong. I didn't like that the school got to preach medieval and clueless diatribes about the gay community without any honest push-back at all.
The author tried to get around this by portraying the teens at the school as 'normal teens', very much aware of what was going on and what was supposed to be going on. They were depicted as feisty, smart-mouthed, joking, making sly remarks about the program, smoking pot once in a while when they were not being observed, making friends, having fun, and so on. There was even one unexpected and fun instance of a night-time rebellious interaction.
This didn't get it done for me though, because what happened was that the author came across almost as though she approved of these programs (pogroms?!). I don't believe that she does so approve which was why I was so surprised that there was so much smug and arrogant preaching going on with so little corrective action in return, especially when these ignorant myths and blind platitudes are so easily exposed and refuted.
The worst character at the school was the co-director, Lydia. She was a control-freak who was very nearly the only person there who was actually in need of sustained psychoanalysis and perhaps medication. She wouldn't even let Cam take off her sweater at one point, for example. Cam was too hot in the room where she was in a one-on-one with Lydia, and there was nothing wrong at all with what she was doing, but Lydia forbade it because, she asserted, Cam was acting-out and being disruptive! Good Lawd A'mighty! I thoroughly detested Lydia. No one like that should ever be in charge of children or teens. Or anyone. Having said that, it sure would have been interesting to learn what her back-story was.
One major betrayal for me was Cameron, who starts out as a rebel, but one who flies under the radar. She presents to the world as "normal" - the "normal" her closed-mind community expects from its teens - but underneath, she was up to all kinds of things, and she was steadfastly and resolutely pursuing her natural impulses. I know that the fundie Christian lie is that homosexuality is not natural, but the truth is that it's found throughout nature, not just in humans, so yes, it's perfectly natural and normal. That doesn't mean everyone should be gay, just like it doesn't mean that no one should be gay. It's a part of nature like everything else out there, and pursued with integrity and compassion, it harms no one. Some people seriously need to internalize that.
To see Cam become so subdued then, was a betrayal of her very core, to me. It's not like she became brainwashed. The author commendably showed her as rejecting some aspects of what she was taught, even as she appreciated the value of some of the other things, but she offered no real resistance! In my opinion, this was out-of-keeping with what we'd been learning about her for fifty percent of the novel thus far! Worse than this, not one of the teens who were in this school showed any real push-back. It was like all of them passively accepted the school's deluded premise that they were indeed sinful, abnormal, deviant, broken children in need of fixing. This complete passivity was hard to take and it was unrealistic, especially since none of them were there voluntarily.
I've seen some reviewers negatively rate this novel for this very reason, but I think they're just as guilty of misrepresenting what happens as are some Christian readers who've accused the author of universally bad-mouthing the Christian community - again, something which never happens. Yes, there should have been more push-back, but no, there wasn't a complete absence of it. Yes, Christian cluelessness over the nature of homosexuality is inexcusable, but the author doesn't bad-mouth Christians per se.
Instead, the author tells it like it is - some black and white and a heck of a lot of grey. She should know, having actually grown-up in the town in which she sets this novel. She authentically portrays the ignorant and misguided attitude which some people - real people in the real world - do have about gays. The fact that one person or even one group worships a god for which there's no evidence whatsoever doesn't give that person or group any right at all to dictate to every other law-abiding citizen how they should live their personal life, what they should think and believe, or what their morality must be. Period. They are quite entitled to practice their religion. They're not entitled to try to force it upon others.
In the end, I can do no other than rate this highly, despite a misgiving or two here and there. It was beautifully written and for a debut novel (or even one way beyond debut for that matter), expertly done. I loved Cameron, Lindsey, Jane, and Adam, and despite some problems I had with Coley's behavior, I really liked her, too, and I wished we could have heard her story. I really thought that we would. I felt strongly that there was unresolved material between the two of them that needed exploring, but realistically, real life doesn't always have a happy ending or offer closure either!
Some reviewers, I note, have chided this for its ending, but I thought it was perfect. It was not your standard trope romantic finale, but despite that (or perhaps because of it) it was perfect; however, it does leave the way open for a sequel, and whether there is one to come or not, I would love to read it. I volunteer right now as a beta reader!
