Quote: Yeah, I skimmed it. But the fact that he presents it in that manner--as a divorcee looking back on his childhood--that kind of stops it from being YA. It makes me think he hasn't read much, if any, YA. But that didn't bother me nearly so much as the fact that I was rather unable to find a single vivid description of a person or a room. And if he's read much gay coming of age gay fiction at all--the queer, sexually charged incidents of his youth are recounted in a manner that's rather lacking in both *ahem* passion and insight...

There's a bit where our narrator is an adolescent hiding in a closet and witnesses a near-act of homosexual sex by way of complicated bullying. This recalled to me a book I read maybe 20 years ago, Behind the Door, part of the gay, Jewish, Italian writer Giorgio Bassani's five-volume Novel of Ferrara, a modest epic about the quiet horrors of life under fascism. That book's title-giving incident of homophobic bullying also viewed from a closet is maybe a lot more complex than we can ask from a first-time hobbyist novelist, but he could have maybe pulled something profound out of the incident... Regardless, it doesn't feel like honest criticism was ever offered to this writer. It's dissapointing to me how much better it could have been. He's got a first draft. That's the hard part. Somebody at some point needed to tell him, show don't tell. Acolyte Press did better coming of age novels than this.