It took me a little while to get into the meter of the prose – the author has a very different way of writing / phrasing. However – the basic plotlines were intriguing enough to keep me hooked to the end. The dilemmas and quandaries faced by teenage Toby are myriad. On the family front - his mother has run away to hide from his father in a less than savoury part of town – swearing Toby to a secret pact not to reveal her whereabouts to his father, who is naturally distraught and subsequently engages an identical-looking private investigator to help him in his frantic search for his wife.
On the friendship side of things – Toby’s best friend is running a-foul of the law and his own religious mother for peddling drugs to all and sundry across town. And overhanging everything is the impending high school graduation prom where Toby’s being pressured from all sides to take a bully-boy’s sister when all he wants is to go with his boyfriend of barely a year’s relationship – Ian (partially blinded with a glass eyeball). And for this partially disabled dreamboat Ian - there's great sex but something just doesn't sit right about him - is he for real or is Toby being taken for a ride.
Toby is consequently bound to all sorts of secret pacts with parents, friends, boyfriend, classmates – and his lies in trying to evade having to tell other’s secrets start to overwhelm him. These same secrets have a way of coming back out of the closet to haunt him – dark truths are revealed from within his own family – and just what is the mysterious dark link between his boyfriend Ian and the dying priest lying in the hospital AIDS ward? And what’s going down between his boyfriend Ian and his runaway mother that neither wants to talk about? Will Toby survive the prom and the final days of his Catholic high school when everyone he’s close to seems to have secrets to hide and whose trust he may have to betray whether he wants to not. A really interesting read … one of the better coming of age tales I’ve read in a while.
P.S. I really liked the word play used whereby the book title links through to the protagonist’s name - Toby Sligh.
On the friendship side of things – Toby’s best friend is running a-foul of the law and his own religious mother for peddling drugs to all and sundry across town. And overhanging everything is the impending high school graduation prom where Toby’s being pressured from all sides to take a bully-boy’s sister when all he wants is to go with his boyfriend of barely a year’s relationship – Ian (partially blinded with a glass eyeball). And for this partially disabled dreamboat Ian - there's great sex but something just doesn't sit right about him - is he for real or is Toby being taken for a ride.
Toby is consequently bound to all sorts of secret pacts with parents, friends, boyfriend, classmates – and his lies in trying to evade having to tell other’s secrets start to overwhelm him. These same secrets have a way of coming back out of the closet to haunt him – dark truths are revealed from within his own family – and just what is the mysterious dark link between his boyfriend Ian and the dying priest lying in the hospital AIDS ward? And what’s going down between his boyfriend Ian and his runaway mother that neither wants to talk about? Will Toby survive the prom and the final days of his Catholic high school when everyone he’s close to seems to have secrets to hide and whose trust he may have to betray whether he wants to not. A really interesting read … one of the better coming of age tales I’ve read in a while.
P.S. I really liked the word play used whereby the book title links through to the protagonist’s name - Toby Sligh.