Only Mostly Devasted, by Sophie Gonzalez

[Ulysses]

Only Mostly Devastated
BY Sophie Gonzalez
St. Martin/Wednesday Books, 2020
Four stars

This excellent YA novel is one of those that really seems to dig into the psyche of the modern teenagers. It makes me wonder, as all good YA novels do, whether I’d even survive being a teenager now. It was tough enough back in the 1970s.

Gonzalez puts all the tropes in place: attractive and smart boy, non-athletic, with a gaggle of female friends; the star jock surrounded by other jocks. The two things that the author does that really set this book apart are the diversity of the cast and the context of the romance between the nerd and the jock.

The context is a summer fling at a lake in North Carolina, where Oliver Di Fiore and Will Tavares find romance that seems real for both of them. Then Will disappears back into his world and Oliver prepares to head back to San Jose, California, with his parents.

Then Will seems to ghost Oliver, and Oliver’s parents drop the bomb on him that they’ve decided to return to California only to pack up and move back to Collinswood, North Carolina, for the next year or so. This is the other part of the context: Oliver’s aunt Linda has cancer, and his mother wants to be there for her family.

We know what’s going to happen, at least in part, because that’s how these things go. Oliver, very cleverly written by the author, is an over-thinker, and sometimes gets in his own way. He is not whiny, nor entitled—indeed he’s a fantastic babysitter for his little cousins and steps up to help his family. He’s a musician, and cooler than your average out boy in a YA book. His almost-instant circle of friends—Juliette, Lara and Niamh (Gaelic, Neev, and I’m grateful the author took care of the pronunciation) are just what you want from a group of BFFs. Only Lara is white. This story quickly takes on the feeling of the marvelous Brit TV series “Sex Education,” where a semi-rural high school in Wales is completely diverse ethnically.

The other shoe drops when, on the first evening after the first day of school, Oliver is taken to a big party and finds himself face to face with Will—in a basketball letter jacket, surrounded by his jock friends, including Darnell and Matt, who become the counterpoint to Oliver’s female trio. Will, of course, all but pretends he doesn’t know who Oliver is, and there you go.

What the story becomes is a study in social dynamics with periodic additions of wisdom from—wait for it—the adults. Oliver’s aunt Linda has met Will, and gets her nephew to talk to her about the mess in which he finds himself. Oliver’s three female friends also play mediators—wary of this newcomer’s intentions and fearful that he might “out” Will to assuage his own emotional upset. There is the added twist that Oliver is not the only LGBT student in the school, apparently, and this fact works its way into the carefully-plotted turmoil.

The equal time given to Oliver’s family life, his relationship with his parents, his aunt and uncle, and his little cousins, is so very important in the realistic texture of this book. Oliver is not the only person with problems, and for him the most difficult lesson of all is learning to look around himself, outside himself, to fully grasp what he needs to do. How do you learn to take care of yourself without forgetting to take care of others along the way?