Two Boys Kissing

3.5

First of all I loved the Greek chorus and the use of we .but It did not wow me . I liked the characters but I felt distant

But not a bad book

Gathering thoughts for a review

Je m'attendais à un roman gay de style “young adult” comme j'en lis quelquefois, le dernier en date était “Boy meets boy” du même auteur. Je m'attendais donc à une histoire d'amour mignonne entre deux garçons. J'ai été agréablement surpris : il y a bien sûr de bons sentiments, c'est la loi du genre, mais c'est aussi très touchant, plus que ne le sont d'habitude les romans de ce style. Sans doute grâce aux paroles des narrateurs, des garçons homosexuels morts du SIDA dans les années 80 et 90, et qui observent désormais les générations suivantes de jeunes garçons qui vivent leur homosexualité au grand jour.

“It's a highly deceptive world, one that constantly asks you to comment but doesn't really care what you have to say.”

Pathétique, profondément touchant, ce livre vient vraiment de faire vibrer en un coup l'ensemble des cordes sensibles possibles qui composent ma personnalité. La narration est splendide, utilisant une sorte de narrateur omniscient, incarné par les voix de tous les homosexuels décédés du sida qui observent la nouvelle génération, ses luttes, ses victoires, ses doutes et ses interrogations, sur fond du défi un peu fou que se sont lancés ces deux garçons de battre le record du monde du plus long baiser.

J'ai mis du temps à commencer ce livre, j'avoue que je ne m'attendais pas à y retrouver une telle qualité, mais j'ai été stupéfié par la richesse et la multitude des thèmes abordés. Tout y passe avec une justesse incroyable, de la douleur du coming out, de la difficulté de s'accepter, des relations dures avec la famille ou plus faciles dans certains cas, des doutes, des peurs, des envies de mort, ... Absolument tout y est décrit avec une justesse effrayante, tellement effrayante que j'en ai eu plusieurs fois les larmes aux yeux tant je me retrouvais dans certains passages.

Le livre porte une certaine tristesse, de ces générations passées qui n'ont pas eu la chance de poursuivre leurs vies, mais aussi un magnifique message d'espoir, d'aller en avant, vers un futur, d'accepter de relever ce pari. Un bouquin splendide que je conseillerais à toute personne qui se cherche encore, ou qui aimerait comprendre ce que l'on peut traverser lorsque l'on se cherche.

“You should all live to meet your future selves.”

Amazing story.
It's a story about shattered dreams, hope, heartbreak, new love, death, and ultimately life.
I think tears were streaming down my face for every fourth or fifth page, there is so much truth and poignancy in this nocel taht everyone, no matter age and orientation can find something of themselves.

This was absolutely breathtaking. Review to come ^^

I read this for Banned Books Week and once again it's just like, ludicrous to challenge this for ~explicit content~ like this is so PG-13. Jesus Christ.

Anyway, it's gorgeous on a sentence-level and I personally really liked the chorus of ghostly queer men who died of AIDS in the 80s. It is interesting to have the kind of sweeping monolith of men (though throughout it they point out dissents among them, that they don't all necessarily have the same reactions etc. but also, they kind of do?) but despite them and a variety of other POV characters, it is mostly a pretty middle-class white gay male (not bi/pan/etc) scene. (altho I was sort of pleasantly surprised by the inclusion of a trans character being affirmed in a gay relationship.)

basically I think
-it's a beautiful book that might appeal more to adult readers and/or pretentious teens
-it's dumb to ban it
-but also by this point in time there are more recent books that are more inclusive and/or more relevant to more of today's queer teens.

I started reading this book by accident, and I am so glad I did. I had no idea Levithan could write such beautiful prose, but there are passages in Two Boys Kissing that are just poetry. (I do not have a copy of the book with me right now, so I can not quote any, but I would love to.)

The book is structured interestingly, being narrated in a first person plural omniscient voice, “We” being a cloud of men who died of AIDS before the disease was really studied and workable treatments were found. I am old enough that I know some of those men in the “We” who narrate. One of them is my friend and house mate Kent, who committed suicide by starvation when his HIV diagnosis was changed to full-blown AIDS. He didn't want to endure the misery of it, and he didn't want to deal with the humiliation of the health care system he would have been subjected to as a poor person. Other friends of mine who are part of that voice are persons I lost track of briefly (really not long at all), and on calling or hunting them up, found out they had sickened suddenly and died.

Although my story is not like any of the characters in the book, Levithan makes them so immediate and so real that I can identify with each. Some reviewers complain that the characters were not fully developed, but I think maybe they just wanted a different book than the one the author actually wrote. He's not giving us action or adventure, or even much character development, but rather a series of extended vignettes in which we may see ourselves, or perhaps not.

I am grateful for the beauty of the words and for the chance to hear my own generation speaking to a younger one, the kids on whose behalf I have been as quietly vocal as I have been, so that they would be born and grow up in a different environment than I did, than did the men who died and who went on to narrate this book.

Be strong, pink-haired boys and kissing boys. I hope you won't need quite as much strength just to stay alive as some of us did, so you can use your strength to flourish. It's still not all the way good, as this book testifies, but IT GETS BETTER, so hang in there, don't jump, have hope. I'm rooting for you.