HALF-MOON SCAR

An overwrought if well-crafted debut about three gay adults who are scarred, sometimes literally, by their childhood, meet up one summer and confront their past.

The narrator, Amy, a 30-something academic, hasn’t been home for more than six years. She lives in Seattle, and her current lover, Robin, is urging her to make a commitment to their relationship, but there is some unfinished business in Amy’s life—one of the reasons she goes home to small-town midwestern Willow Bay. Alternating between present and past, when she lived on the same street as classmates and childhood friends Gina and Gavin, Amy tells the story of alienation and difference that all three have shared. She soon meets up with Gina, who coaches soccer and basketball teams by day and tends a gay bar by night. Amy has always regretted that she didn’t respond to Gina’s teenage advance at a funfair but, instead, panicked by its implications, cut her wrists and was hospitalized. Amy still indulges in mutilation, but Gavin, whom Gina is looking after in the run-down house they share, is dealing with the pain of being gay in an even more harmful way: he’s become anorexic, which, Amy discovers after a visit to the library, is most often a sign of gender confusion in men. Gavin, as Amy recalls, enjoyed cross-dressing and was taunted by other children for being queer. She also recalls the guilt she felt over the hurtful comments she made the night she and Gavin tried to lose their virginity together. As she tries to get Gavin to eat, she’s conscious of still being attracted to Gina—but a freak, if melodramatic, accident brings matters to a head in time for requisite healing and closure to take place.

Heavy, heavy symbolism in a slender, slender story.