A Mark on My Soul

I read this book after it broke the heart of a friend of mine. Appropriately, it's a heartbreaking book. You don't expect a romance novel to have a tragic ending. Particularly a terrible suicide that feels as real and contemporary as this story.

It left me questioning a bit who this book was written for. It's a young adult book and it seems at first like a gay teen romance. But the pact with romance novels is that the couple gets together and there's a happy ever after. Instead here it all falls apart and we have a tragic suicide. It's a real story and important to tell! But is it well told? Maybe so, given how emotionally affecting the book is.

Still it feels awfully heavy for the light YA romance writing style. I didn't love the prose, the writing is a little simplistic and trying too hard to be youthful. And the book has the simplistic structure of a romance. Which, fine! but then to lead that to a tragic ending feels a bit off. Not disrespectful exactly, I'm sure the author meant absolutely well here. Mostly I'm just confounded a bit.

I like how well this book talked about the pressure of the closet. About how hard hiding who you are is, how liberating telling others can be. Or tragic, in this case, a kid destroyed by his hateful parents and church. Ugh. I wonder if the story would have worked so well if Parker had felt all that despair and then rose above it somehow, with Noah's help, freed himself from the hate and survived. I would have liked that a lot better but it wouldn't be the same book.

I think this book just needs to be approached carefully. My friend had no idea it had a tragic turn and had no defenses, it really upset him. I could imagine this being very hard reading indeed for younger gay kids in bad situations.