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Thursday, Nov 20, 2008
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Book Marks |
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| Book Marks | ||
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by Richard Labonte -
SGN Contributing Writer We Disappear by Scott Heim (HarperPerennial, $13.95) Bottoming out on crystal meth, bereft of a boyfriend, and bored by his writing job, Scott leaves New York for a trip back to his native Kansas, summoned by - and concerned about - his mother, Donna. A widow with cancer, she's become obsessed with stories of missing children, and tells her confused son she has recently recovered the memory of her own childhood abduction. Scott's grip on reality is itself pretty tenuous - he makes desperate phone calls to his dealer back in New York for an infusion of speed - but the flat Kansas landscape enters the world of weird when he returns home from the hospital, after a visit to his dying mom, to find a teenage boy shackled in the basement. A thread of childhood trauma, disappearing teens, and emerging identities connects this dark psychological thriller to Heim's first two novels, Mysterious Skin and In Awe. Stripped of overt Gay sexuality but brimming with seductive prose, We Disappear is a wonderfully strange and compelling novel that ought to appeal to straight and Gay readers alike. Fully Involved by Erin Dutton (Bold Strokes Books, $15.95) Back when Isabel Grant was the tag-along little sister who annoyed them, tomboy Reid Webb and childhood pal Jimmy Grant considered the girl an intrusion into their bucolic and - after Reid came out to Jimmy, blunting his amorous interest - platonic friendship. Years later, Isabel is a ravishing (and, to all appearances) straight professional, and Jimmy and Reid are firefighters - and still best friends, living next door to each other, with Reid helping to raise Jimmy's son, Chase, after the death of his wife. Then Jimmy dies fighting an apartment fire, Isabel comes back into Reid's life as young Chase's guardian, and childhood frictions - complicated by Reid's guilty attraction to Isabel - flare into emotional warfare. This being a Lesbian romance, no plot points are spoiled by the fact that Reid and Isabel, both stubborn to the core, end up in each other's arms. But Dutton's studied evocation of the macho world of firefighting gives the formulaic story extra oomph - and happily ever after is what a good romance is all about, right? My Most Excellent Year: A Novel of Love, Mary Poppins, and Fenway Park by Steve Kluger (Dial Books, $16.99) This lyrical, laugh-out-loud hilarious book about baseball lore, first Queer love, a passion for Broadway, and boys and girls finding each other is being promoted as a novel for young adults. But it's smart enough, charming enough, and grown-up enough for a reader of any age - and of any sexual orientation - to savor. It's an epistolary tale (like Kluger's sweet-natured Almost Like Being in Love), told through journal entries, e-mails, IMs, and the like, from and to three teens. T.C. Keller is a tender-hearted, would-be Casanova with a passion for the Red Sox; he's in love with aloof Alejandra Perez, the diplomat's daughter whose family has the Clintons over for dinner; and rounding out the trio is Augie Hwong, whose adoring family and loyal friends are hoping he'll figure out how very homosexual he is. T.C. also writes letters to his dead mother, Augie communes with assorted Gay divas, and Alejandra uses Jacqueline Kennedy as her muse; they're an unusually literate bunch. And when the gang connects with a young deaf boy, Julie Andrews makes a cameo appearance, in a truly magical tale. Straight Acting: Gay Men, Masculinity and Finding True Love by Angelo Pezzote (Kensington Books, $14.95) Another publishing season, another Gay self-help/dating-advice book. For this how-to book, Pezzote draws on several years of his work as a therapist, as well as on his sideline syndicated and online "Ask Angelo" column, in which he answers letters from Gay men seeking clues to the puzzle of Gay life. His central concern is that America's cultural insistence on masculine behavior instills a belief among Queers that overt Gay behavior is somehow shameful, and certainly not "manly." It's by no means an original thesis, but Pezzote's assessment of the barriers to a satisfactory Gay life - including the inevitable "Ten Quick Tips to Find True Love" - brings with it the gravitas of both his personal experience and the experience of several dozen men whose self-questioning correspondence peppers the usefully sage pages. (In fact, there are two dating-advice books this season: Alyson has released The 7-Day Dating and Relationship Plan for Gay Men, by Grant Wheaton, a slimmer, somewhat wittier, but much less substantial take on the topic for Gay guys on the prowl.) Featured Excerpt: You know you've earned your wings as a father when you drop by your kid's bedroom to kiss him good night and on your way out the door he stops you cold with, "Dad? Is love supposed to hurt?" I'm not sure if there's an easy answer to that particular riddle (yes, I am - there isn't) but hearing that question from my son is the reason I wanted to be a parent in the first place. So I asked him to tell me of all the things he feels when he thinks about Andy, and I'd tell him what it was like when the same roller coaster got hold of me. -from My Most Excellent Year, by Steve Kluger Footnotes: MORE THAN 460 Queer-content books from almost 200 publishers are in the running this year for Lambda Literary Awards ("Lammies") in 21 categories - a record number of nominations, according to Lambda Literary Foundation executive director Charles Flowers. "This has been a spectacular year for LGBT publishing in terms of the number of books published and the number of participating publishers," he said. "Last year, we had 147 publishers nominate their books, so that's an increase of 29 percent, while the number of eligible books rose 22 percent." Between three and five finalists in each category will be announced March 15, with Lammies awarded May 29 at the 20th anniversary awards ceremony, held this year in West Hollywood - the day before Book Expo America, the annual booksellers' convention. For a complete list of nominated books, visit the foundation's website, www.lambdaliterary.org... ELLIS AVERY, author of the lesbian novel The Teahouse Fire, and Mark Doty, author of the Gay memoir Dog Years, are winners of the 2008 Stonewall Awards, selected by the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered Round Table (GLBTRT) of the American Library Association. They'll receive their awards on June 30 at the 2008 annual ALA conference in Anaheim. Richard Labonte has been reading, editing, selling, and writing about Queer literature since the mid-'70s. He can be reached in care of this publication or at BookMarks@qsyndicate.com. |
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