Snow Boys
What a lovely emotional book! It took me awhile to get into it but the book just gets stronger and better with each chapter, the final third was very compelling to me.
It's a young adult gay romance. Fairly light on the sexy stuff. But what it really is is a meaningful story about two young men finding themselves, their place in their school community, and each other. Overcoming some problems. Both my partner Ken and I read it and found ourselves in it.
Structurally the author does something interesting. Each character has two narrative arcs and they are well balanced off each other. Dean, the brainy one, is really struggling to understand being gay and being comfortable with his crush on Ben. He's got problems in life but they're relatively minor, mostly just singing with the choir. Meanwhile Ben, the basketball player, starts the novel already knowing he's gay, having coming out to his best friend, and knowing unambiguously how he feels about Dean. But then Ben has some really serious problems in his life, his family falling apart.
Those four challenges are the narrative threads of the book. On the romance side we have Ben and Dean falling in love. And figuring out how to tell other people. Then on the other story side we have Ben and Dean each overcoming their challenges. Both on their own and with support from the other. And the relative magnitude and progress of each of those four stories gives the book a lot of texture as the narrative is interwoven. The author deftly weaves that all to an emotional crescendo towards the end of the book, a climax, and it's quite effective.
As an aside one of the themes in the book is coming out in high school and dealing with homophobia. And it's quite awful in one part, the book gets quite dark. I appreciated this: so many young adult gay books I've read romanticize coming out unrealistically. This book gives voice to my own fears coming out when I was young, has the story grapple with how people react in their various ways. It ends positively (it is a romance novel after all!) but in a believable way. I appreciated that.