An entertaining and perceptive YA take on the predicament of gay adolescence.
A gay teenager tries to break into a new high school and Hollywood while firming up his identity amid the uproar of the 1960s in this coming-of-age novel.
Sixteen-year-old Haskell Hodge loves acting (he has an iconic cereal commercial under his belt), playing piano (his Liberace parody brings the house down), and living in the bustling Manhattan of 1966. But when his divorced mom decamps to Europe with her lover, he gets dumped in Los Angeles to live with his aunt, uncle, and bratty cousin. His gangly, nerdy presence and fondness for show tunes soon make him the target of gay bashing by Lucky Miller, the handsome, dumb swimming champion at Encino High School, who refers to him as Judy Garland. Standard-issue bullying ensues—Haskell gets roughed up in hallways and urinated on in the showers. Then he is befriended by classmate Henry Stoneman, a dreamboat possessed of “near-perfect…handsomeness,” a blossoming acting career, a wonderful interpretive touch with Chopin, fluency in four languages, and serious martial arts prowess that he imparts to Haskell in bare-chested wrestling sessions that leave the latter flustered and aroused. Henry’s feelings remain a mystery, but under his tutelage, Haskell is soon ready to stand up to Lucky. Unfortunately, when Henry and Haskell try out for roles in a movie being produced by the latter’s estranged dad, rivalry strains their friendship. And Hollywood’s insistence that gay actors remain barricaded in the closet starts to shadow Haskell’s prospects. Seigel’s (The Mouth Trap, 2007) hectic yarn deals with serious themes of maturation and belonging in a lighthearted vein that grows somewhat darker as the story proceeds. There is angst but not much rebellion in the YA novel, which is set in a largely Jewish, middle-class milieu where adults dispense good advice and empathy and the Vietnam-era counterculture is just background noise on TV news. The author draws vibrant, if sometimes cartoonish, characters, like Delia Jacobson, a theater-mad student who speaks in pig Latin. In addition, his prose is brisk and funny, its tone set by Haskell’s comic kvetching and hand-wringing. (“I might become radioactive and turn into one of those green, hairy creatures I read about in my comic books,” he frets after reading about toxic waste in the San Fernando Valley.) Haskell’s endless neurotic uncertainty over who to be and what to do will captivate readers.
An entertaining and perceptive YA take on the predicament of gay adolescence.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-947392-67-0
Page Count: 329
Publisher: Acorn Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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