LAMB: A novel in snapshots, what it felt like to be young and queer and there

LAMB: A novel in snapshots
TROY FORD
Sweet Flag Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: D is shaken when his mercurial friend Lamb vanishes just before they're set to move in together. The news of his death three years later shadows him like a ghost.

Sifting through Lamb's journals decades later, D uncovers a raw, intimate portrait of a sensitive misfit navigating a world that never understood him.

From their first meeting at an elite all-boys school to the chaos of 1990s San Francisco, Lamb's story unfolds in a tangle of tenderness and rebellion, anguish and adventure. Through journal entries, letters, poetry, and stories, Lamb is a coming-of-age in snapshots that captures the dazed spirit of young men searching for belonging in the aftermath of the AIDS crisis.

A Tales of the City for Generation X—a dark afterparty of gay awakening both aching and unforgettable.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: A very sweetly remembered lover from the first years of knowing you're queer will always call your heart home. It's this book that tells you why it did for Author Ford.

We all grow older with this kind of memory of our coming of age, if not always coming out. It's the nature of being adolescent in the modern world...finding one's tribe, feeling one's first romantic love (for most anyway) are very deep experiences. Bound up with our particular time and place, they're all a stew of heady, intense, immediate sensations and thoughts and things learned.

It felt very *right* to be in D and in Lamb's heads from the time just that crucial bit ahead of them.

You can't go home again; but you can remember it, you can summon the sensations thoughts feelings to your older self. There are times that is what you need and should seek out. This book will likely do that for boys born in about 1959 through 1966. It felt good to be young then, even if you weren't *happy* you felt you *could* be.

To all y'all born after 1980: I'm so sorry my generation fucked up so very badly. We did you out of this glorious sadness, and we're only ever going to pay for it.