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Spooning Leads to Forking
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Spooning Leads to Forking, by B.A. Smith
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By B.A. Smith
Published by the author, 2018?
Four stars
“He was a little spooked when he realized this was what intimacy must be.”
A young-adult novella that is raunchy to the point of pornography, and yet startlingly tender. We have two lower-middle-class boys, Dylan Scott and Michael Hernandez. Seventeen, they live in the small town of Galant, Montana. Michael is a jock, a basket-ball player, while Dylan is more of a loner and a gamer. They’re not really friends, but not enemies either. Dylan is not popular, but he’s not an outcast. Like his parents, Dylan is sort of uninvolved.
Until, one day, goofing around at the cafeteria table, Dylan’s plastic spoon locks with Michael’s plastic fork.
The author, fanfic writer B.A. Smith, gave this book the subtitle of “A Gay Teen Romance Story,” but it’s not terribly romantic so much as frantic and hormone-driven. Having never really talked to each other, Dylan and Michael discover a mutual physical attraction that is hilarious in its desperate awkwardness. And yet they persist. They work at it as only goal-driven boys can. Neither boy is quite willing to embrace being gay, and yet they do nothing very effective to hide what they’re doing from their families or even their schoolmates. Moreover, their denial of any emotional aspect to their shenanigans is fraudulent from the beginning. Being teenage boys, however, the don’t know how to deal with emotions, and simply don’t.
It takes a horrifying, idiotic almost tragedy to knock both Dylan and Michael off track, and force them to reevaluate the feelings and the reasoning behind who they are to each other. For a book that is not only short, but largely consisting of messy sex, “Spooning Leads to Forking” surprises with the romantic punch it has in spite of its characters and its context. It is funny, but also painful, to watch these boys crash headlong into something entirely new and terrifying for both of them. At the same time it is startling to witness the kind of bumbling maturity that arises like mushrooms in a damp basement. They don’t really think, they just react, and feel, knowing that too much thinking will only stop them from doing what seems to be inevitable.
Apparently Ms. Smith had this book banned by Amazon, so you’ll have to poke around to find out how to acquire it (for free, at the moment). Really, in a universe that celebrates crap like “50 Shades of Gray,” this book is a sweet, dirty, touching bit of adolescent truth.