WITHIN THESE COUNTY LINES, New Adult coming-of-age novel

WITHIN THESE COUNTY LINES
BRIAN ZEPKA
Pennor Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
99¢ ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Eighteen-year-old Stetson Delancey never thought breaking up with his boyfriend would turn him invisible.

In Penango County, Pennsylvania, high school couples carve their names into the legendary Ardor Tree, a rite of passage said to grant love that lasts. Stetson and his boyfriend were no exception. But a bitter breakup just before college splinters their future, and in a moment of anger, Stetson does the unthinkable: he hacks their names from the tree.

That’s when everything in his rural hometown goes from boring to bizarre. Shadows flicker where they shouldn’t. Strangers pass by like he’s not even there. And some people stop seeing him altogether.

With just two months left in Penango and his college dream slipping away, Stetson races to uncover the tree’s secrets before he vanishes for good. But when he meets a boy only he can see—a boy who may have secrets of his own—Stetson begins to wonder if breaking free from his hometown means letting go of everything or learning to hold on to what matters.

WITHIN THESE COUNTY LINES is a queer coming-of-age novel about the unraveling of first love, hometown magic, and how sometimes we can’t uncover the truth about others without confronting the truth about ourselves.

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

My Review: Stetson's a queer kid at the inflection point between ending the perspectiveless wasteland of adolescence and taking on the habituation to and of emotional regulation that we call "young adulthood." At eighteen, he knows when he fucks up there'll be consequences; sometimes he just doesn't much care. This is where we meet him.

What happens to start Stetson on his path to maturity is not revealed until about two-thirds of the way into the story...bye now, fifth star...while he very thoroughly trashes his now-ex boyfriend (of two years, at eighteen) in the vaguest most undefendable terms. It's clear Precious is a Major Drama Queen. He's got his BFF Whitley (I mentally called her the most patient girl in the world because she never snapped on this inconsiderate chud despite how often he simply ghosted her, used her as ears to whine into, etc.) as his captive audience for obsessively overthinking all the weird stuff that's happening to him. It's not 100% clear to me the supernatural implications of Stetson becoming invisible to Murray, the ex, and his sudden ability to "see" the long-missing Xander were real or simply the intense fantastical overdescriptions of Stetson's wounded spirit.

What I want to praise is the evocation of how domestic violence becomes normalized within a relationship. If you screw up, like Stetson did with his big dramatic announcement to Murray, and your partner's response is what Murray's was, you're going to need to consider an exit strategy. Props to Author Zepka for making this a point, though why wait so long to bring it up?

I'm generally positive about the read, though more for teens than readers in my age bracket. As the author's already in the YA market, I'm supposing this is more aimed at "New Adults" (a kind of reader I characterize as "YA with pubic hair"). It's still not on my top-ten list but I'm not the marketed-to reader. I'd prefer a story with much better female representation, the sweet, patient BFF is in short supply in the real world; but that's me being an old guy with multiple axes that need grinding. I'd buy it for my grandkid who's navigating a new relationship territory. If they asked for it.

GIRLS WHO LIE TOGETHER, exactly what it says on the tin

GIRLS WHO LIE TOGETHER
JESSA RUSSO
Kindle Freebie
$0!

Rating: 2.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Easy summers lead to hard falls in this Grease meets Mean Girls contemporary romance…

When seventeen-year-old Renata Carpenter hijacked her stepdad’s classic car, she hadn’t planned on totaling it and landing her best friend in a cast from hip to heel. She definitely hadn’t planned on being sent to a work program in New Orleans as punishment. And she certainly hadn’t planned on falling in love.

But Ren’s summer of forced manual labor has a bright side: her name is Brit, and she’s everything Ren never knew she needed. First love becomes first heartbreak when their summer romance comes to a crashing close earlier than anticipated. Adding insult to injury, Ren’s break-up with Brit is followed by a big move to a small town.

As if starting senior year completely alone isn’t bad enough, Ren soon discovers that the Hell on Heels mean girl who rules Sun Ridge Prep with an iron fist and a vicious tongue is none other than her first love. Too bad this Brit is far from lovable.

But Ren knows the girl beneath the façade, and she refuses to give up on rekindling their relationship. Secretly, the girls pick up where they left off, falling deeper in love and risking it all to be together. But when their affair is exposed by Brit’s boyfriend, Ren and Brit are faced with the ultimate choice: love or acceptance.

Because they certainly can’t have both.

I RECEIVED THIS BOOK AS A PROMOTION. THANKS!

My Review: The author markets this as a YA title. I disagree. I'd hesitate before I gave it ti a sixteen-year-old, or a naïve seventeen-year-old. So let's say it's more a New Adult title.

It's definitely on the money with the Mean Girls comparison. Ren is a classic Mean Girl. She's also a very horny character, and no respecter of boundaries. Brit: "I'm not gay!" Ren: "Get a load of those tits! Such a sweet pair of [upper]lips!"

Then there's the slur usage. I get reclaiming words, and even use queer myownself these days. That was a nasty one in my youth. But using slurs and only slurs? Not now, not ever. That's reinforcing abuse.

While I thought Brit was toying with Ren's feelings...denying you're gay does NOT absolve you of responsibility for behaving sexually with someone of the same sex...I found Ren deeply dislikable and overbearing. Brit's manipulative. Neither is someone I'd like to spend any more time with.

The main issues above weren't made better by the way the story is structured, with time-gaps that just make the chemistry between these two feel very unlikely for teens to experience. The writing was okay, with flashes of creative interest once in a while. Not a favorite read. Caveat emptor re: sexual content.

ARTHUR AND TEDDY ARE COMING OUT, gentle, fun amusement about the complexity of Coming Out

ARTHUR AND TEDDY ARE COMING OUT
RYAN LOVE
Harper 360
$18.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: No one in the family is prepared when 79-year-old Arthur Edwards drops a he's gay, and after a lifetime in the closet, he's finally ready to come out. Arthur's 21-year-old grandson, Teddy, has the same secret. But Teddy doesn't feel ready to come out yet – especially when Arthur’s announcement causes shockwaves in the family. Can Arthur and Teddy navigate first loves, heartbreak, and finding their place in their community?

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

My Review: Cute take on the evergreen "coming out is hard" plot. The fact is that there are a lot more late-life outcomers than one would imagine, and we're not told much about them. It's not sexy, I guess...who thinks about wrinkled old people and sex unless they're trying not to cum?

The shocking thing for me is how comparatively few of these stories there are. I'm very glad to see that changing.

New-adult books are what I've always characterized as "YA with pubic hair" books. That still holds true. This is not a romance, or a smexytimes comedic novel. This is a fun, light, unchallenging look at the eternal truth of coming out: It's hard, it's scary, it's often the source of terrible judgmental responses from the most unusual, unexpected places, but in the end it's The Only Way.

Living a lie is often couched in and obscured by the language of love. Especially true for late-life outcomers. Love, however it looked in the past, looks different as we age. The need and desire to offer and accept love in the way that would always have been one's preference does not invalidate or diminish love already offered; it does not invalidate a lifetime's love or "cheapen" an established bond. Love, as Arthur is modeling for Teddy, isn't like pie, only so many slices to go around; it's the bakery, and the wheatfields.

Read this story to be reminded of how extremely abundant the world is. How much it matters to love; and how much loving honestly and openly frees up the giver and the receiver to tap deeper into the limitless supply there is. It won't change your world but you'll smile a few happy smiles as you read.

That's worth a lot in the world we live in.

THE GENTLEMAN'S GUIDE TO VICE AND VIRTUE, a New Adult MM historical romantic novel

THE GENTLEMAN'S GUIDE TO VICE AND VIRTUE
MACKENZI LEE
Katherine Tegen Books
$8.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Henry “Monty” Montague was born and bred to be a gentleman, but he was never one to be tamed. The finest boarding schools in England and the constant disapproval of his father haven’t been able to curb any of his roguish passions—not for gambling halls, late nights spent with a bottle of spirits, or waking up in the arms of women or men.

But as Monty embarks on his Grand Tour of Europe, his quest for a life filled with pleasure and vice is in danger of coming to an end. Not only does his father expect him to take over the family’s estate upon his return, but Monty is also nursing an impossible crush on his best friend and traveling companion, Percy.

Still it isn’t in Monty’s nature to give up. Even with his younger sister, Felicity, in tow, he vows to make this yearlong escapade one last hedonistic hurrah and flirt with Percy from Paris to Rome. But when one of Monty’s reckless decisions turns their trip abroad into a harrowing manhunt that spans across Europe, it calls into question everything he knows, including his relationship with the boy he adores.

I RECEIVED THIS BOOK AS A GIFT FROM MY OLD PAL, NORA. THANK YOU, YOU SWEET THING. *SMOOCH*

My Review: My feelings about this read have percolated for a long time now. I didn't like it much at first. I felt radically impatient by page 346 of 501 (last story-page; there's a meaty Author's Note to take us to page 513). I know that stonking great wodges of hard-bound paper are very much in fashion in this market segment, and that the world is a better place because the books that are so huge are also stuffed with People of Color (and a gay PoC in this iteration!), women with Dreams (medicine as a woman's career makes sense to me, since every mother I've ever known plays doctor constantly to all her kids plus their dad), and persons belonging to sexual minorities (Henry is bisexual). These are all excellent things! I want these messages to be heavily represented in the world! I just don't want to spend quite so much time with them. I am old, and there are fewer eyeblinks ahead for me than for the proper audience.

That audience, judging from the Kindle highlights I've seen, is eagerly absorbing the author's ideas. Literally everyone in the world loves this quote:

The great tragic love story of Percy and me is neither great nor truly a love story, and is tragic only for its single-sidedness. It is also not an epic monolith that has plagued me since boyhood, as might be expected. Rather, it is simply the tale of how two people can be important to each other their whole lives, and then, one morning, quite without meaning to, one of them wakes to find that importance has been magnified into a sudden and intense desire to put his tongue in the other’s mouth.

I myownself think it's mildly amusing, even modestly witty, but...somehow I don't ring like a bell when I read it, unlike an absurdly large four-digit number of other highlighters.

Then again, as hinted at above, I'm over sixty. This fact clearly needs to be brought to my attention more often. I don't seem to be able (or perhaps "willing" is more accurate) to retain my focus on the gargantuan gulf that separates me from the intended audience of this story.

So there was that kick in the smallclothes. Still, I got over it and got on with the read. And let me say that, in typical YA/NA fashion, the drama is dramatic and the pining is intense without ever veering into the carnally explicit. This was a, well, it was...good, I guess.

I say that, as a card-carrying smutmonger, because the fact is I'm uncomfortable with the hypersexualization of Western (not solely US) culture. (I reviewed THE PORNIFICATION OF AMERICA, so this isn't the first time I'm saying this.) This pining and longing and simply being too scared to make a move has the wonderful, true-to-real-life benefit of giving Author Lee a chance to unleash some of the best lines she's got:

A small shift in the gravity between us and suddenly all my stars are out of alignment, planets knocked from their orbits, and I’m left stumbling, without map or heading, through the bewildering territory of being in love with your best friend.
–and–
Love may be a grand thing, but goddamn if it doesn’t take up more than its fair share of space inside a man.

These are wonderful, funny, and true things for the intended audience to hear. Yay!

Author Lee's cute call-outs to her tribe are welcome lighteners of mood at different moments. She deploys the snark in small, concentrated, and beautifully timed doses:

“Poetry is the most embarrassing art form. I can sort of understand why all the poets off themselves.”
–and–
God bless the book people for their boundless knowledge absorbed from having words instead of friends.

Heh. I resemble those remarks. So will the younger readers, and their sense of being in on the joke will no doubt give them the same warm glow it does me.

The specific thing that powered me, older and less eager, to continue my grim trudge to page 501, was the fact that Author Lee never once made me roll my eyes by using anachronistic language, or attributing anachronistic concepts such as I've shorthanded above, with her eigtheenth-century characters. No one says "gay" or "bisexual," though the labels fit; they didn't exist then, and the distinction between hetero- and homosexual identities had yet to be formulated. Sodomy is an act; any man or woman can commit it; and thus Author Lee puts period-apporpriate language of description instead of identity in her folks' mouths:

When you are a lad who enjoys getting other lads in bed, you have to develop a rather fastidious sense for who plays the same instrument or there’s a chance you’ll find yourself at the business end of a hangman’s knot.

What is universal and constant is the way being in love impacts a person's ability to think and function, their perception of self, of the belovèd, of the world:

“You’re hopeless,” he says, and it is so strange and horrible and utterly lovely how the way that he’s looking at me makes me want to both back away and throw myself upon him. It hurts like a sudden light striking your eyes in the dead of night.
–and–
It is remarkable how much courage it takes to kiss someone, even when you are almost certain that person would very much like to be kissed by you. Doubt will knock you from the sky every time.
–and–
We are not broken things, neither of us. We are cracked pottery mended with lacquer and flakes of gold, whole as we are, complete unto each other. Complete and worthy and so very loved.

Why would I, given my praises as sung, rate the book a seemingly mingy four stars of five? Because I love the message more than I love the read. I am surely grateful to Nora for the gift, and glad of the read being done, but I won't read more in the series. It's enough to know the series continues despite my not being along for the ride. So long live this long, long read! Lovers at last, and no it's not a spoiler because it's a feature of the genre, lovers and friends and eager explorers of the entire beautiful world. That is so very worth reading.