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
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
