Claire Stevens's Blog, page 67

Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan

This book came up on a list of 'Short Books to Read to Bump Up Your Reading Challenge Total'.

I'll be honest here, I'm starting to get slightly obsessed with my 100 book challenge.  I did the same challenge last year, but got sidetracked around May by reading Pillars of the Earth, a damn fine book, but so long I literally thought I'd die of old age before I managed to finish it.  I still blame Pillars of the Earth for the fact that I didn't go out on New Year's Eve.  (I spent nearly whole of the 31st December 2014 curled up on my sofa, reading feverishly, desperate to meet my book quota.  Am I proud of myself?  Why, yes, I am.)

So anyway, when Boy Meets Boy came up on my radar I decided to give it a go.  It was £2.99 on Kindle which is more than I usually tend to pay for a book, especially one which only exists as a set of binary code, but the lure of being ahead of the game on my reading challenge proved too much.

The plot is centered around a boy called Paul, a gay teenager who meets an entrancing boy called Noah.  Noah captivates him totally and the rest of the book deals with how Paul, Noah and their diverse bunch of friends navigate the world and their own love lives.  It kind of helps that they live in a  town that sounds a lot like Brighton; lesbian, gay, bi, straight, transgender - everyone lives together in perfect harmony.  

There's a brilliant cast of characters from the star quarterback, a six-foot-four crossdresser called Infinite Darlene, to the  Joy Scouts (used to be the Boy Scouts, but Boy Scouts wouldn't let gays join) and Boy Meets Boy is a lovely book.  David Levithan captures perfectly the heart-wrenching feelings of falling freshly in love with someone and what it means to have beautiful, supportive friends.  

If I have a criticism, it's that the book is slightly too saccharine-sweet for me.  It left me thinking of that old Coke ad from the 70s.  The dark, twisted cynic in me would have preferred some more heartaches, dilemmas and so on to keep things interesting, but perhaps that says as much about me as it does about David Levithan.   Don't get me wrong - the book deals with issues (confusion over sexuality, parents who find homosexuality morally repugnant), but everything seems to get wrapped up neatly by the end of the book in a big sparkly bow.

Having said this, Levithan is a complete master writer, so he still gets a respectable...

7/10

Zombiecorns by John Green

Yes, this is by John Green.  That John Green.  The-Fault-in-our-Stars John Green.

When I first saw this novella, I looked at the picture of the unicorn on the front and thought, 'Hey, look at that.  A Zombie-Unicorn mash-up.'  Now, just to manage your expectations, it's not about zombie unicorns.

It's about zombies who are obsessed with corn.  Like, sweetcorn.  Corn-on-the-cob.

I know!  I thought the exact same thing!  But d'you know what?  If anyone can pull off a story about zombies who love corn, it's John Green.  Zombiecorns is on a creative commons licence (i.e. free download) and John Green has put this blurb in the front basically saying 'Oh, I just rattled this off one weekend.  It's full of mistakes and doesn't scan very well, but here you are anyway.' (Or words to that effect).  And it's still a really competent piece of writing.

Damn you, John Green, for your excellent writing skills.

Anyway, Zombiecorns is set in a post-Apocalyptic USA, where almost the entire population has been zombified by an errant strain of GM sweetcorn.  Our heroine, Mia, is one of the only still-humans around.  The narrative switches between present day, where Mia is holed up in a basement, alone, terrified and with only dwindling supplies of food, to some point a little while in the past, where she was tooling around town blasting the shit out of zombies with her friend Caroline.  

Zombiecorns is a fun read.  It rockets along and okay, it's not as polished as the rest of the John Green canon, but it's still a decent read for a couple of evenings and worth a solid (and fangirly)...

8/10