March 10, 2014
The eponymous hero of Schrag’s frisky debut is an awkward, horny 17-year-old who, after a humiliating romantic failure, decides to spend the summer of 2006 in New York City with his older sister, Casey, who hasn’t come out yet as a lesbian to their parents. Eager to score with older women and shed his loser status, Adam moves into his sister’s Bushwick apartment, where she lives with her roommate June, who’s besotted with her, and a mysterious trust-fund baby, Ethan. Adam’s summer of love gets complicated, however, when he discovers that gender is not a simple matter in Casey’s circles. Then he meets Gillian, the beautiful redheaded girl of his dreams. Problem #1 is that she is a lesbian, problem #2 is that she thinks he’s a transgendered man. As they gradually fall in love, Adam is torn between revealing his secret, currently hidden beneath Ace bandages, and preserving their awkward but sweet romance. While the novel is far more conventional than the progressive themes might suggest, Schrag’s brisk narrative has plenty of hilarious scenes, including a memorably raunchy interlude at a fetish club. Growing from crass boy to sensitive man, Adam comes to view gender and sexuality in a new light, resulting in one of the most original coming-of-age stories of recent years. Agent: Merilee Heifetz, Writers House.
April 15, 2014
An emotionally mature, socially tongue-tied and sexually anxious teenage boy abandons the comforts of suburbia for a walk on the wild side in LGBT New York. Best known for mining her own adolescence in her trilogy of graphic memoirs, here Schrag (Potential, 2008, etc.) paints a lush picture of the queer scene in Brooklyn circa 2006 through the eyes of an unusually straight-laced protagonist. Her muse is the lesbian side of New York's gay subculture, but choosing a shy, awkward teen boy as the portal into the underground was a bold choice. After being ditched for a girl by his best friend, Adam Freedman opts to stay with his closeted gay sister, Casey, in a dingy apartment for the summer, along with her butch roommate, June, and their Craigslist-acquired flatmate, Ethan. Floating along in Casey's wake, Adam learns to navigate the weird wonderland of New York and gets to see a side of the city most boys who like girls don't get to experience, along with the high drama of any tightly woven, politically active and sexually volatile scene. At one of many parties, Adam meets one of those girls who stop your heart, a redheaded goddess named Gillian who immediately takes a shine to him. This being a romantic comedy set in a supposedly post-gender metropolis, naturally the meet-cute couple experiences a few bumps in the road, namely that Gillian identifies as a lesbian and believes Adam is a trans boy, with lady parts instead of his constantly raging erection. Sensitive readers should know there are some raunchy bits here and there, with many variations of boot-knocking and a bawdy visit to an underground sex club. It all sounds very progressive, but the talented Schrag's gifts for characterization and dialogue make the whole enterprise sweetly entertaining. A well-composed story about love and lust in all their myriad variations and about a boy finding his place in a mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up world.
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May 1, 2014
Schrag switches gears from her autobiographical graphic-novel series, High School Chronicles of Ariel Schrag, and turns to fiction, undertaking a major challenge. She attempts to convey the thoughts, voice, actions, and mind-set of a straight, wealthy 17-year-old California boy determined to meet the love of his life. She succeeds in being on target in tone, but the plot strains credulity. Adam hasn't even made out with a girl yet, so how does spending the summer with his older lesbian sister in New York City help with his quest? Casey, very much on the gay scene socially and politically, does take him places, and he even meets the redhead of his dreams. But Gillian, an attractive lesbian in her early twenties, beds Adam because she believes his deceitful claim that he is a female-to-male transsexual. To live this lie, he devises various deceptions involving bungee cords (don't ask). He can't share his outrageous secret with Casey, or her sometime lover, Butch Casey (again, don't ask), or apartment mate June, who lusts after Casey. Finally it is Ethan, who also shares the apartment, who becomes Adam's mentor in Schrag's unusual, very explicit coming-of-age novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)