The BookKids Blog!

Day 3 of our LGBT Blogstravaganza brings a special post from Garret Freymann-Weyr, who really went all out writing these reviews.  I mean, wow, how can you NOT read these books after reading what she has to say? She’s chosen to review one non-YA title and one YA title, but I think you’ll agree that both sound amazing.  Garret Freymann-Weyr is the author of many books for young adults, including the Printz Honor book My Heartbeat, Stay With Me, The Kings Are Already Here, and her latest, After the Moment.

GARRET FREYMANN-WEYR on MAURICE by E.M. Forster
Maurice by E.M. Forster is not a YA book, which, to my way of thinking, is kind of a tragedy.  I am one of those people who believes that if we asked teenagers to lose themselves in Forster novels, instead of  Young Adults ones, they would totally get why reading can be just like falling in love.  Forster’s clean, elegant language, his young, muddled characters who yearn for truth, beauty and love, and his ability to be malicious and compassionate at the same time is about as seductive a literary style as is possible.
Of all Forster’s novels, Maurice is the one I press upon young, gay people, as well as older, straight ones.   The novel’s story is fairly straightforward.  Set in Britain during Edwardian times, Maurice Hall and Clive Durham meet in Cambridge and fall deeply, madly and platonically in love. (“The sole excuse for any relationship between men is that it remain purely platonic,” Clive says.)  Clive adores Maurice, and Maurice yearns for Clive, but Clive is unable to defy his upbringing, or his surroundings (in England at that time, you could go to prison for being a homosexual).  Clive winds up “discovering” women, gets married, and breaks Maurice’s heart. . . . but all is not lost.
Maurice, although slow to understand himself, is loyal to his own desires.  He finds true and lasting love with a man far outside his and Clive’s social class.   A gamekeeper on Clive’s estate, Alec Scudder understands Maurice, body and soul, as Clive never did.   In Alec’s arms, “Happiness overwhelmed Maurice . . . .   Light drifted in upon them from the outside world where it was still raining.”
In this day and age, Maurice can sound like an ordinary boy meets boy, boy loses boy, boy meets different, braver, more loving boy.  But there is nothing ordinary about the novel.  Forster wrote Maurice between 1913 and 1914.   He dedicated it “to a Happier Year,” and it was not published until 1971, after Forster had died.   If you have read Howard’s End, or even A Room With A View, what strikes you about Maurice is how clean, vivid and alive the novel is.  Gone are the elaborate plots, philosophical musings and class obsessions which Forster had previously used to conceal his true subject – love of, by and between men.  By coming out of the closet, even though it was only to the empty page, Forster writes with a passion and truth that is deeper and more blinding than the passions and truths found in his earlier novels.
Even if  you have never read Forster,  the novel is an immense treat.  In its depiction of one man’s refusal to succumb to despair and loneliness, Maurice is not merely inspiring.  It is a work of art that’s life altering.

GARRET FREYMANN-WEYR on MY FATHER’S SCAR by Michael Cart
Before getting into the specifics of My Father’s Scar by Michael Cart, I want you to think of baklava, with its layer upon layer of pastry, nuts and honey. When you have a piece in your mouth, it’s impossible to tell which is which, and if you like one element better than the other.
My Father’s Scar is an elegant, heartbreaking coming-of-age tale. It is a depiction of how love,like a weed, can thrive in the most inhospitable of places. It is a snapshot of life in small town America back when protesting the Vietnam war could get you suspended from school. It is that rare YA novel that not only invites its readers to think, it assumes that they can.
Andy Logan does not have a great start in life. He is a fat little kid, who is bullied at school. At home, his father is an angry drunk, and his mother a woman who sighs so much that Andy “used to imagine that if you could somehow collect those sighs, within a week—if you were lucky—you’d have enough wind for a gale force strong enough to blow my father out to sea.” The town where Andy lives is mostly full of people who find relief from the daily grind in school football games or church services where the preacher favors what he calls, “muscular Christianity.”
What Andy does have going for him is a thoughtful mind and an unending thirst for beauty. Maybe it’s the long-distance running he takes up to get out of the house, or maybe it’s his brief contact with his Uncle Charles, a poet and book lover, but Andy finds ways to transcend the grim hand life has dealt him. He becomes not just lanky (all that running) but the sort of boy who thinks of the sky “as cobalt blue and so cloudless it looks like a canvas that has been stretched tight and painted.” The light in his uncle’s book-lined study was “streaming in through the windows… golden like coins.”
There is an operatic quality to some of the things that happen in Andy’s life as he struggles to navigate around his father’s rage, his mother’s quiet despair, and the town’s murderous homophobia. While a freshman in high school, Andy makes friends with Evan Adams, a popular senior, whose musical talent, star position on the gymnastics team and general kindness makes him a magnet for both girls and outcasts.
Evan, who otherwise displays a lot of common sense and wisdom, tells his pastor, in front of a packed church, that he is gay. A lot of predictable things happen: he’s no longer welcome at church, his school friends desert him, and he loses his place on the gymnastics team. And then it gets worse, on an epic scale that Cart depicts with clarity and gentleness. Cart is careful in the midst of all this drama to never lose sight of his hero, and Andy absorbs not only the mob’s reaction to his friend, but Evan’s bravery.
There is another really spectacular plot development involving the school’s football star, but I’ll let readers have the joy of discovering that. What’s important to know is how beautiful, delicate and soaring this novel is. I ended My Father’s Scar feeling as if I had heard an aria about Andy Logan’s fierce and joyful fight towards love and acceptance.