Queer

My Heartbeat is another YA book from the Printz Award Challenge and I picked it up on audio last week. When we started listening to it, I wasn’t impressed and pretty much quit listening after that first couple of chapters.

Yesterday, as we headed to south Florida for synchro, I turned it on again and pretty quickly got hooked. TW, not so much. She hated all of the characters accept “the Father”. I disliked the “Father” a lot and am troubled that he’s the only character that TW liked.

Anyway – I thought it was a good “gay” book. The whole “I’m not gay, I don’t know if I’m gay, but we’re a couple or maybe we aren’t a couple because that would mean we are gay” thing – awesome.

When TW read the CD case for True Believer and told me it was the second in a trilogy I almost said “forget it” – Printz Challenge or no Printz Challenge. I do not like to read books out of order. Ever.

But, I said what the heck and put the first CD in the player.

Right off the bat, it was a little disconcerting because the voice of LaVaughn is the same voice as “Baby Girl” from Upstate. I was afraid it was going to be such a similar book that I’d just be confusing my characters all of the way through. But it wasn’t like that at all.

None of the poor black teens went to jail. None of the poor black teens were having sex that they shouldn’t have been having, though there was Jolly who had already done that – a couple of times. There was also the gay boy storyline, very unusual in a novel about black city teens.