Spoilers.

About a year ago, I stumbled across a description of this young adult fiction book while searching for another title, and it looked interesting. Amy is dealing with the recent loss of her mother, and throughout the book, discovers that her best friend, Sara, has kept secret from her the fact that she’s a lesbian. Amy is left trying to deal with the triple blow – death, secrets, and a change in the way she has to view the world and her friendships.

Now this sounded interesting to me. I decided to check it out last week, and read it today after finishing my last book. It didn’t take long, something like two hours. Unfortunately, while this is written about sixteen-year-olds, it seems to be written for eight-year-olds (but not like she meant it to be that way, just that it was badly written). A sort of odd way to juxtapose mature content with elementary style. I wasn’t real impressed. The characters didn’t seem real, their feelings felt fake, the plot was forced and most of it was shoved into the last twenty pages. A lot of it read like junior-high romance novels.

And beyond that, the ending left me a little upset. The book was published in 1999, and I know homosexuality was even more controversial of a subject then than now, but it felt like the author had a very specific opinion and purposely watered it down in order to make the book more acceptable. I’m not sure what her opinion was – it could have been that homosexuality is an acceptable part of life and we should be more open minded in our society, or it might have been that homosexuality is wrong and something that will hurt everyone – but either way, it was like those two opinions got mixed up at the end. Amy, at the end, is uncomfortable with Sara, tells her she thinks she’s doing something wrong and non-Christian, but also decides she’ll be her friend and tolerate her. At the same time, she personally acknowledges that she’s been a bad friend and that Sara is a good person who has never chided Amy for her religious beliefs (they have different ones), and thus may be the better person and friend here. It really felt like either the author wasn’t sure what her opinion was, or, like I said before (and I think this is more likely) she had an opinion and tried to water it down and neutralize it.

I was very disappointed. I felt like the story was interesting enough that it could have been well written, but wasn’t. Thankfully it only took up two hours of my time and now I can move on to something more interesting, like Nabokov!