The storyline to Boy Meets Boy is both very simple and very convoluted. Paul is a high school sophomore, dealing with all the regular things high school sophomores have to deal with. His best friend Tony suffers at home because his parents can’t accept the fact that he’s gay. His other best friend, Joni, has suddenly decided to ditch everyone she knows to date a guy who’s using her. His ex-boyfriend, Kyle, has decided to talk to him again after a year, and wants to get back together. And in all this, Paul has to wade through discovering what it’s like to really love, after he meets the new boy in town, Noah.

This was a fun, cute, teen romance book. Paul’s area of the world is strange, probably more idealistic than any place that really exists in the US, a small town with a high GLBT population and an even higher tolerance level. Other than Tony’s parents and a skirted-over incident with bullies in Paul’s past, there doesn’t seem to be any of the prejudice and discrimination prevalent today. So it was a bit of an idealistic setting, but I was okay with that. It was the sort of world I hope to see someday, where people can get along together without all the hatred and violence. Actually, Paul makes a nice statement about this at one point of the book, when a group of kids are at the only cemetery in town, “where people of all religions and beliefs rest side by side. Just like a community.” I love it!

The book was actually full of wonderful one-liners. My favorite came from the beginning, where Noah’s sister is described as “dressed in a lethal combination of pastels.” But it wasn’t just the witty writing that shone through. What I really liked about the book was the realistic characters. There are so many, with so many bizarre personalities (I’m thinking here about the homecoming queen/star quarterback, Infinite Darlene), and yet, they were all realistic, plausible, and believable. The book didn’t have the painfully-intense teenage emotion written into, say, Thirteen Reasons Why. Instead, while all the characters obviously felt all the anguishes in their life, there was also this overall feel of movement, of moving beyond one hurt and one happiness, of going on with life no matter how happy or sad it is. Because in truth, high school is not the end-all of one’s life. At the same time, Levithan isn’t disparaging of the teens, saying their pains don’t matter. He just presents this duel perspective, of intense moments woven into a rapidly-flowing river of time.

The characters were so much fun, and while some of them – Infinite Darlene, for example – might seem stereotyped from my description, they weren’t. They were three-dimensional, and it was obvious that the author respected them. In the end, gender really ceased to be important. What did it matter that Paul and Noah had to work through their problems, instead of “Paula” and Noah? The book could have been written from “Paula’s” POV instead of Paul’s, and it would have felt exactly the same. The fact that these characters were gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, or straight (there seemed to be a bit of everything in here) had no bearing whatsoever on their relationships, friendships, fears, pains, joys, and love. There was actually one character, the ex-best-friend-now-enemy of Infinite Darlene, named Trilby, whose sex I still don’t know. She was female, but I can’t tell if she was biologically male, like Darlene, or not. It didn’t matter, though. She was who she was, just like we ALL are who we are, despite our gender and sexual orientation – or any other characteristic we might be labeled with.

That, to me, seemed to be the important point Levithan was making. We are not defined by our labels. We simply are who we are.