I started this book back in October. I plodded through the first half slowly. I was bored. will grayson annoyed me with his constant kvetching. Will Grayson wasn't gay, which confused me. Wasn't this book supposed to be about two gay Will Graysons?
Then, I came to the fateful night where Will Grayson met will grayson and everything was thrown into chaos. I was immediately hooked, and read ~150 pages today because I had to know what happened to the Wills and Tiny and Jane.
This book is full of wisdom about what it means to be kind, to be friends, and to be in love. It's full of awkward moments and transcendent moments. I loved it.
A few days ago, I blogged about LGBT literature. I mentioned that we needed more books like Levithan's Boy Meets Boy in which being gay is just a part of who the characters are, and they go on about their lives and tell their stories.
None of the gay characters in this story seem to face any real prejudice, beyond the innocent and strikingly benign ignorance of a Little League team or the math nerds at the lunch table. In some ways, the Chicago-suburb setting of this book is like the tiny town in Boy Meets Boy, a fantasyland where being gay is totally mainstream and accepted. Oh, how I long for this day to come.
I think my favorite part of the book comes almost at the very end. I won't give away what has happened or who the speaker is, but here's a quote for you:
"I want you to come over to my house in twenty years with your dude and your adopted kids and I want our kids to hang out and I want to like, drink wine and talk about the Middle East or whatever we're gonna want to do when we're old. We've been friends too long to pick, but if we could pick, I'd pick you."
(On a side note, I edited the above for language. There is a lot of language in this book. Too much for a school library, and too much for my students, even if they could handle the thematic elements. Honestly, it didn't really bother me.)
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