Spin Me Right Round

Luis is a terrible protagonist who never learns anything. He is selfish and overly dramatic and never changes. He thinks his school's gendered prom is the worst thing to have ever happened and that it's all the headteacher, Mrs Somboon-Fox's fault, despite her explaining to him why she can't change it. Luis gets angry with his boyfriend over...nothing???

And then he goes to 1985 where he thinks he needs to get a closeted gay boy who's already being harassed, in an extremely religious school to be out and proud. He knows he dies, but doesn't take this into consideration, simply believing that the only way to be a good queer is to be out, even when this could have literally killed him. Which it almost did. Luis makes every terrible decision while being immensely cringy, and the story bends to fit his narrative; Chaz becomes confident in his gayness (but gets kicked out and has to face his extremely homophobic family) and when Luis returns to the future, his school is a perfect queer space. But what does this really mean? Nix is voted prom royal, but seeing as we're supposed to be being progressive here, shouldn't we be scrapping the whole concept of voting for the ‘best' person in your year? All this book does is have Luis do wildly dangerous thing for a distorted belief of ‘progression' and then he returns to a future that makes no effort to actually be progressive in any way that hasn't already been done, or better, elsewhere.

(Also, Cheng needed wayyyy more page time than what he got for the importance of his character)