Like a Polaroid Picture

I'm currently engrossed in Sugarless by James Magruder. This is yet another one of those non-YA titles that could so easily be, or could at least be appreciated by a YA audience. My bff recently read it and told me that it was right up my alley. Hmm, what about it ever could have made her think that? The 15-year-old gay protagonist? Show tunes? Sex scenes? 1970s time frame? Swap the setting from Chicago to the UK and we would have had a perfect storm of a book, but even barring that, it's got everything I can't resist. And I doubt if would have been on my radar had she not stumbled upon it. Tis a fine thing to have a friend who knows your tastes so well.

Just check out this paragraph from p. 115:

Okay, so no Penthouse Forum letter, no pictorial or photo or old Japanese print, nothing had made a case for kissing. After two hours, there was still no bottom to how incredible it was. It wasn't just first base on the way to better things, it was as good as the rest because it never had to stop; it had no beginning or end, it ran without rules and filled every in-between. It didn't think. It came and went, it was every piece of punctuation, and I was good at it right away.

How totally rad to get such a thoughtful, visceral dissertation on kissing from the point of view of a teenage boy!  Should the book ultimately disappoint--which I have no reason to believe it will, but bear with me--it's got that going for it, and that goes a long way.

The rest of my reading list contains the same books I've had on rotation since the beginning of time, or more accurately, the onset of pregnancy brain. All good stuff, but it's great to have something new and unexpected to shake it up. I like to shake things up, in case you hadn't noticed.

Written material copyright 2010 Dawn A. Emerman

Comments

[Jodie]

Ah that's an excellent quote and it sounds right up my alley as well (glad to hear it continued to be great as you say in the post above).