YA LGBT Books discussion

We had a tie vote, and I'm too busy to do a run off, so we'll have a choice this month. Our second August 2014 Book of the Month is Educating Simon by Robin Reardon

Feel free to discuss the book or related topics and post reviews. This thread may contain spoilers, so if you haven't read the book yet, proceed at your own risk. I look forward to discussing this with the group.

Bought this at B&N - but it freezes up my Nook (which actually makes me feel good, having just battled with a format error on my own self pub book *see, it's not just me*) But I'll have to deal with that before I get to read. The author is a favorite, though, so I can't wait to get it fixed... Ooh, I had a thought - got out my old Nook and it works there, if a little slowly. Onward...

Thanks to the author intervening, I managed to get a copy of this book :)

Simon is a London teenager looking forward to his last year of school before (hopefully) heading to Oxford. His father died a few years ago, but he's still grieving, partly because there's a distance between him and his mom. He has a cat, his main comfort and support, and an imagination which is both help and hindrance.

Then his mother tells him she has met someone, they're getting married, and moving to be with her new husband and his daughter in Boston.

Simon is devastated in a lot of ways. He's leaving his home, the city he's comfortable in, and his plans for the next year. He has to leave his cat behind too. There is a new man taking his beloved father's place. And he will have a younger step-sibling who has severe Asperger Syndrome, and whose special needs will have to be accommodated.

Frankly, at the beginning of the book, I didn't much like any of the main characters. The mom was cool, and selfish. (I spent over a year after getting engaged 1000 miles from my fiancé, with only a couple of visits, in pre-Skype days. It wasn't easy, but it made the rest of our lives work. All the rationalizations about why they couldn't wait a year to be together so that one child could avoid major disruptions, especially loss of a beloved pet, felt pretty hollow.) Similar things applied to her new husband. He wasn't as cold, but at the same time he made it clear that Simon's needs would have to be secondary to his daughter's. That's not unrealistic - a child with her situation does dominate the household simply by virtue of needing, not wanting, a workable life. But again, waiting a year would have been simpler for her too in enough ways that his rationalizations about not waiting seemed selfish. So there was that.

But Simon is, for his age, whiny and melodramatic, and an unreliable narrator. He has genuine complaints, and I sympathized, but the way he went about it seemed designed to scream his immaturity, as opposed to potentially addressing his situation. So I kind of wanted to smack him.

But then I read on...

So the action moves to America. And here, the characters begin to fill out in complexity. Simon's mother becomes a bit more sympathetic, Simon turns out to be more confused than he appeared, and a mentor of sorts appears, who will be instrumental in keeping Simon from a fast crash and burn...

In the end, Simon grows amazingly through this book. Both in his emotional maturity and in his understanding of other people and what motivates them. In truth, if I had one issue with the book it was the degree to which Simon changes over the span of one year.

The mentors and experiences are there, of course, but when I discovered later in the story that he was in fact only 16, not 17 as I had thought, I was a bit more tolerant of his early immaturity, and similarly a little more skeptical of his final emergence from adolescence.

I admit, it also gave me more pause about Ned. (view spoiler)[The introduction he gave Simon to gay life in Boston was a big boost for Simon and yet, it was pretty clear that he knew he was introducing Simon to, and encouraging him to go out with, older guys who might be interested in him primarily for sex. That's not necessarily all bad, but it's not something I think I'd have done for a sixteen-year-old and the child of my employer, even one who was depressed and needed to see the upside of being gay. But I admit I'm a parent of teenagers and not a gay guy. I could accept it, in the context of the story, but there was the potential for pain for a guy that age. (hide spoiler)]

The addition of a transgender secondary character was done well, and gave the story interest. The autism-spectrum issues of Simon's step-sister Percie were a big focus, and both kept the book from feeling like another gay-boy-coming-of-age book. I occasionally wished toward the end that Simon would put a foot wrong in the murky waters of dealing with both those characters, for the sake of realism, but in general I was engaged with the book, and eager to see how it came out.

I really like the story line with Michael. It didn't go where I expected, it felt real, and I think it added to the plausibility of the story as a whole.

So in all, another interesting book by a favorite author, with multiple story lines that came together to hold my interest, and a main character who started out a little annoying and redeemed himself by the end.

I have to say, like all Robin Reardon's books, this one is no different and I set it down at 35 percent (which is about where I have set them all down).

I have put two of her books to my LGBTQ youth group, and not one of the 19 kids in my group finished either book.

This one reads like all the rest. A well written YA book written for adults.

I came to her books as an adult, although both my kids read and enjoyed Thinking Straight as teens. One has always preferred adult books, the other read a lot of YA at the time. But tastes do vary.

I had that feeling about Levithan's Two Boys Kissing - a lovely, wonderful book that felt like it spoke far more to my generation than to teens.

Kaje I totally agree with Two Boys Kissing based on the narration. Out of all Reardon's books the only one I managed to finish was The Evolution of Ethan Poe which I actually enjoyed in parts. But her books just tend to drag for me, and don't ring true to life, specifically a teens life.