SHAKESPEARE IN SOUTH FLORIDA, good story I feel is being misunderstood by not-targeted readers

SHAKESPEARE IN SOUTH FLORIDA
CHRISTOPH PAUL & CAROLINE MACON FLEISCHER
CLASH Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$5.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: In this coming-of-age romantic comedy, a 17-year-old virgin film nerd, Joseph Caldo, who sees himself as a real-life art film, experiences first love, first sex, and first heartbreak in the surreal setting of South Florida while trying to make sense of Shakespeare’s stupid plays.

Caldo has no real social life, unless arguing about film online counts. Having seen so many films while struggling romantically, he has formed a theory that women pick romantic partners the way they pick which movie to watch. He’s definitely not a blockbuster, a rom com, or even a horror film, he’s more of an indie art film that is unfortunately funny. He worries he’ll never find the person who will accept and love him, the way that he accepts and loves his favorite obscure films.

That is until he meets Alexia at his grandmother's retirement home. Alexia was court-ordered to do volunteer work for her DUI but it's cool, Caldo has issues too, and it feels like they have a real connection. But there's also Valerie. The new girl at Caldo's awkwardly small school. She's a straight-A student who is attending on scholarship and is assigned the difficult task to mentor him in Shakespeare's plays. The two opposites have nothing in common except for being romantics who do nothing but fail at romance.

With first jobs that go very wrong, untimely food poisoning, and fake prom dates, Caldo unintentionally reenacts Shakespearian tropes in the heart of South Florida. Humor award-winning author, Christoph Paul, and Caroline Macon Fleischer's Shakespeare in South Florida is a quirky romantic comedy about being 17 and falling in love.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: "Unless you're rich, a model, athlete, or a cocaine dealer, South Florida is not as glamorous as people think. It's somewhere between Hell and Purgatory."

Word.

It could be just me, but a lot of people who've read this book and weren't thrilled by it seemed to me, as I was surveying the opinion landscape around the rewad, to be fundamentally off the mark in interpreting the read. Maybe it's me that's wrong, but what I saw in the very things the reader-response reviewers took issue with and exception to, was deliberate, calculated stylistic choices.

I myownself read this as Caldo's book, the way a seventeen-year-old would write a book with maybe some stuff that isn't necessarily *correct usage* but says what he needs to say. I can't say the typos were deliberate...I only possess a DRC not a finished copy...but it gave me the feeling I was right there, in that moment, with Caldo while he figures out what the hell all these feelings are by reaching for what he's been told are Humanity's most relatable romantic thoughts and expressions (Shakespeare) and mixing it up with the cultural zeitgeist-bearers he hears and his peers accept as authoritative on love (Billie Eilish).

Author Christoph's over thirty, so I've no authentic clue as to whether he got it right for the seventeen-year-olds I want to read this book; but I grew up being told Holden Caulfield spoke to my generation of boys, which he didn't, so I'll hold off on that conversation. I'm old enough to be Caldo's grandpa. I see what I think Author Christoph's tryig to do, and I approve, like my mother approved of what Salinger was trying to do in Catcher in the Rye. I saw how different the twenty years between Salinger's book and my reading of it had made the world, yet still *got* the story and liked it a lot. No such time-gap exists here, so I hope it will be even more intimately relatable.

In a slightly muddled way I'm trying to get across the fact that I think most who rated this story lower than my four stars did so out of a misreading of what was being done in the book. I saw the same words but from a different, more immediate and more personal angle, framed by authorial intent to speak to an audience that only peripherally includes me.

If I had a late-adolescent grandson I'd give him this book. I think we'd have a grand time reading it and talking about it.

It's not a costly ebook, so maybe read a sample through my proffered lens and see if you don't put it on your ereader for real.

LIES WE TELL ABOUT THE STARS, good YA treatment of grief's realities

LIES WE TELL ABOUT THE STARS
SUSIE NADLER
Dutton Books for Young Readers (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$10.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A gorgeous debut about friendship, grief, and new beginnings set in near-future San Francisco in the aftermath of a catastrophic earthquake and on the cusp of the first human mission to Mars.

Celeste Muldoon is alone when the Big One finally hits, because, for the first time ever, her best friend stood her up after school. Nicky and Celeste share a birthday, matching tattoos, an obsession with the upcoming Mars mission, and pretty much everything else. So why did he ghost her on the day she needed him most?

As the quake’s death toll rises and days pass, Nicky and Celeste’s parents fear the worst. But Celeste doesn’t buy it. He couldn’t be dead. Nicky’d spent their senior year selling essays to rich kids and was about to get caught. He’d told Celeste about his plan to vanish, to reinvent himself and escape the disaster he’d created. The quake would be perfect cover.

But she can’t convince anyone that he could still be alive. Only Meo, a mysterious stranger who was somehow mixed up with Nicky, seems to believe, but Celeste has every reason to distrust him—even if her heart races whenever Meo shows up.

When Celeste finds Nicky’s notebook, it sends her and Meo on a quest across the broken city, up the coast through towns sheltering quake refugees, and eventually all the way to Florida, where the mission to Mars is about to lift off.

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

My Review: Celeste is a spoiled, solipsistic brat, the kind of kid my mother called a typical teenager...utterly sure she is the center, the reason, the ultimate source of others' feelings and actions. How dreary, right parents? Here we go again.

Only partially true. We do spend a bit more time with Celeste taking a widespread tragedy more personally than is ever justified. What drags Celeste into the larger world of adulthood is her determination to make the world give her a reason that she has to experience the horror that is loss and grief. There is, in other words, hope for her yet.

That's the adult reward for reading the story. I put on my YA hat for the rest of the review.

Structurally it's a quest novel that follows the hero's journey, so it taps into the pull this story always exerts. Celeste is shown as the hero to some advantage because she has strong self-confidence, and learns through adversity to trust that she is able and willing to make her own way. She learns, again through adversity, that acting out her negative feelings about others is a losing game. Her spirit-guide, Nicky, is not explored in depth; he is a ghost of some power, whose interactions with Celeste read to me as fantasy but could easily be interpreted as "from beyond" by less jaded readers. Meo, in the here and now, is uninteresting to me; he serves Celeste's desires and offers her companionship on terms that solidify her understanding of boundaries.

I'd like to shoutout the prose, in particular the resonance of the phrasemaking that permeates the story. There's a smart kid out there who will twig to how this style is chosen to do a specific emotional thing that isn't overbearingly, ham-handedly guiding you to Feel This Now. (Spoiler Stasi look away: Keep the first line in your head while reading the end.)

I would give this to an ordinary fifteen-year-old without hesitation. Not really so comfortable to hand to younger people than that, the independence and boundary-setting are just a bit more...mature...than their social development. But for that grand or nibling just getting to the "I want I yearn I long for" age, it can offer some guidance on that journey. It's always best to do this teaching by storytelling.

LITTLE F, On the Road for Queer youth

LITTLE F(aggot)
MICHELLE TEA
The Feminist Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A new epic novel about a teenage queer runaway from cult classic author of Blackwave and Valencia Michelle Tea.

In Spencer’s fantasies, the breezy, queer streets of Provincetown, MA, are utopia, a place where he can be free. Yet when a violent attack in his suburban Arizona schoolyard sends him to the hospital, he decides queer utopia can’t wait. And one night, with the help of his best friend, the teenage witch Joy, he hitches a ride to find it.

The cross-country road odyssey that follows brings Spencer from new moon rituals in Arizona canyons to Texas bus stations, from the luxe drag stages of Houston’s Montrose district to the jazz-soaked streets of the French Quarter and beyond. This new novel from Michelle Tea tells the story, by turns raw, romantic, and sweet, of a sheltered boy taking his first leap into queer life, among all the complicated queers who live it.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Road novels lend themselves beautifully to the coming-of-age genre. In a road novel, the main character is by definition seeking some unknown, longed-for thing...adulthood is that thing, the long-dreamed-of delights of not being under someone else's thumb, making your own decisions....

I know, I know, it's as far from reality as a time-travel novel is. The traveler/comer-of-age doesn't know that (yet) so let it ride while the trip educates the youth into disillusionment's many pleasures. ...wait...pleasures? Spencer is, like so many of us formerly young queer lads going to run head-first into reality and find it pretty good.

Escaping homophobia is not possible, but getting out of a bully's sights is not a bad idea. As Spencer moves to other peoples' whims, aka hitchhikes, to get to Provincetown, the world shows him a bright face. He meets people who help him, in spite of taking him away from the direction he's set; lots of endearing, heartfelt chats; sleeping on couches (my back twinged just typing it); finding his first reciprocated love.

A lovely story, but not one we haven't read before (over thirty, anyway), so best really as a gift for your sweet young giftee. You know the one...not ready to come out; not ready for The Talk; but turning life over in their mind painfully loudly.

Give them this book to give those gears a bit of "others before you have been there, here's what they say about it" lubrication before you, their parents, and the rest of us go deaf.