Boyfriends with Girlfriends by Alex Sanchez

I've been catching up on a lot of recent queer YA lately because I'll be at the GSA Student Conference happening in Edmonton next weekend. Since I've read other books by Alex Sanchez (Rainbow Boys; Getting It), I thought I'd just flip through his Boyfriends with Girlfriends to get a feel for it instead of reading the whole thing. It didn't work that way, however, because I got sucked right in and read every word.

Sanchez has created four believable teen characters with a mix of ethnic backgrounds: a gay guy, a bisexual guy, a butch lesbian and a bisexual young woman. The issue of bisexuality is sensitively handled and central to the romantic conflicts. The realistic dialogue moves the story along quickly (although I disapprove of all the cell phone use while driving!). The four of them go through all kinds of relationship angst as they sort out the early stages of attraction and dating. They are sweet kids and the book is sweet too.

The book jacket does a good job of reflecting the contents. I found some background about the design on the CBC (Children's Book Council) Diversity website. Laurent Linn, art director at Simon & Schuster, said he "aimed to create a cover that looks 'hot,' like a movie poster, but shows the characters interacting in ways that suggest the story's complexities. Casting models who resemble the characters was key, of course, as was posing them to be true to their relationships (it was quite a photo shoot)!" Read the whole post about portraying diversity on book covers here.

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Saenz

Ari Mendoza and Dante Quintana are best friends in El Paso, Texas, where Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe. Author Benjamin Alire Saenz crafts a powerful coming out and coming of age story through Ari's distinctive voice. He is a loner and a tough guy to outside observers, but a lot is going on under his surface.

"I knew I wasn't a boy anymore. But I still felt like a boy. Sort of. But there were other things I was starting to feel. Man things, I guess. Man loneliness was much bigger than boy loneliness. [...] I was changing into someone I didn't know. The change hurt but I didn't know why it hurt. And nothing about my own emotions made any sense."

Dante is opposite to his friend in many ways, but especially in how he wears his unabashed heart on his sleeve. His love of poetry rubs off on Ari, to Ari's surprise.

"You could smell the rain in the desert even before a drop fell. I closed my eyes. I held my hand out and felt the first drop. It was like a kiss. The sky was kissing me. It was a nice thought. It was something Dante would have thought."

Saenz explores self-identity and personal relationships in layers: ethnic heritage; sexual orientation; machismo; fathers and sons; mothers and sons; brothers; and friends.

"What should we eat?" I said.
"Menudo," he said.
"You like menudo."
"Yeah."
"I think that makes you a real Mexican."
"Do real Mexicans like to kiss boys?'
"I don't think liking boys is an American invention."

I highly recommend this book to teen and adult readers alike. It is just so full of heart... which happens to be where all the secrets of the universe reside.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Apocalyptic daydreams, an ancestral curse, and the horrific regime of Trujillo -- "the dictatingest dictator who ever dictated" -- The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a story of diaspora. From the Dominican Republic to New Jersey, author Junot Diaz follows the members of the fated Cabral family, mostly told in the voice of Yunior, a fellow Dominican immigrant. Yunior's narration is uncensored, as if the reader is one of his ghetto buddies. He sounds like Diaz's alter ego in this excerpt about fuku, a curse or doom:

"A couple weeks ago, while I was finishing this book, I posted the thread fuku on the DR forum, just out of curiosity. These days I'm nerdy like that. The talkback blew the fuck up. You should see how many responses I've gotten. They just keep coming in. And not just from Domos. The Puertorocks want to talk about fufus, and the Haitians have some shit just like it. There are a zillion of these fuku stories. Even my mother, who almost never talks about Santo Domingo, has started sharing hers with me."

Yunior was Oscar De Leon's dorm mate in college, as a favour to Oscar's older sister, Lola. Oscar was a lonely geek who weighed 307 pounds. He was obsessed with reading, and writing, science fiction and fantasy. Lola worried about Oscar's coping skills.

"I wasn't as old-school as I am now, just real fucking dumb, assumed keeping an eye on somebody like Oscar wouldn't be no Herculean chore. I mean, shit, I was a weight lifter, picked up bigger fucking piles than him every damn day.
You can start the laugh track anytime you want.
He seemed like the same to me. Still massive -- Biggie Smalls minus the smalls -- and still lost. Still writing ten, fifteen, twenty pages a day. Still obsessed with his fanboy madness. Do you know what sign fool put up on our dorm door? Speak, friend, and enter. In fucking Elvish! (Please don't ask me how I knew this. Please.) When I saw that I said: De Leon, you gotta be kidding. Elvish?
Actually, he coughed, it's Sindarin."

The story moves back and forth in time and place, occasionally switching over to a woman's voice. Audiobook narrators Jonathan Davis and Staci Snell take turns performing in the Penguin edition [5 hours], handling the intermingled Spanish words smoothly. (Davis grew up in San Juan.) I'll be seeing Junot Diaz at the Vancouver Writers Fest later this month, and I must be prepared that his voice will not be that of Jonathan Davis. (Nor of Yunior, for that matter). I'm curious, however, to hear if his conversation style is similar to that in his writing. His storytelling has impressed me immensely. Here's one last excerpt:

"The family claims the first sign [of the curse] was that Abelard's third and final daughter, given the light early on in her father's capsulization, was born black. And not just any kind of black. But black black -- kongoblack, shangoblack, kaliblack, zapoteblack, rekhablack -- and no amount of fancy Dominican racial legerdemain was going to obscure the fact. That's the kind of culture I belong to: people took their child's black complexion as an ill omen."

I enjoyed the literary references throughout. Beli Cabral, Oscar and Lola's mother, is the black daughter mentioned above. She landed a scholarship at one of the best schools in her town in the Dominican Republic, but she had no friends there. "It wasn't like In the Time of the Butterflies, where a kindly Mirabal Sister steps up and befriends the poor scholarship student. No Miranda here: everybody shunned her." (Note to self: you must really get around to reading Julia Alvarez's novel about the sisters who resisted Trujillo and were murdered.)

I look forward now to Diaz's newest book, a collection of short stories, This Is How You Lose Her, which are also narrated in the voice of Yunior. Diaz was awarded a MacArthur fellowship earlier this week.

Readalikes: Diaz himself suggested one, by titling one chapter The Gangster We Are All Looking For; Le Thi Diem Thuy's award-winning first person narrative, shifting in time and place, is about a Vietnamese immigrant to America. The Dew Breaker (Edwidge Danticat) is about the Duvalier regime in Haiti. Fault Lines (Nancy Huston) moves backwards in time (as Diaz does in the first part) loosely linking characters in the Jewish diaspora. And for another account of survival under cruel dictatorship, The Orphan Master's Son (Adam Johnson).

Strange Pilgrims by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The day after I began making travel arrangements to add Geneva to my upcoming European trip, I started reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez's short story collection, Strange Pilgrims. The very first story, Bon Voyage, Mr. President, is set in Geneva. Don't you love it when that happens? (The serendipity, I mean. Receiving an invitation to visit a cousin in Geneva is also nice.)

I don't even remember who recommended this book, only that it was a man who said two of his most favourite stories are in Strange Pilgrims. I don't know which two, but I now have my own. "I Only Came to Use the Phone" is about a woman whose rental car breaks down on a remote road in Spain and ends up trapped in a mental hospital. The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow has a distraught Caribbean bridegroom unable to negotiate French bureaucracy while his bride lies in a Parisian hospital.

I read the edition translated by Edith Grossman and published in Canada by Knopf in 1993. The jacket summarizes thus: "These twelve extraordinary stories by South America's preeminent man of letters are set in contemporary Europe and recount the peculiar and amazing experiences that befall Latin Americans visiting or living abroad." Sublimely surreal.

Under the Mesquite by Guadalupe Garcia McCall

In Under the Mesquite, Guadalupe Garcia McCall uses verse to tell a coming of age story from the point of view of Lupita, the eldest of eight siblings in a Mexican indigenous family living on the American side of the border. As a result of their mother's serious illness, Lupita must step in to take charge of the rest even though she is still in high school. McCall's lyrical style is both gentle and moving.

"In the squint of morning / before anyone else is awake, / when the roaring sounds / of unbridled verses / rush furiously through my head, / the mesquite is my confidant."

Readalikes: Seeing Emily (Joyce Lee Wong) and Make Lemonade (Virginia Euwer Wolff) are other coming of age stories told in verse.

Putting Makeup on the Fat Boy by Bil Wright

YA literature has introduced me to so many unforgettable characters and now I'm adding New Yorker Carlos Duarte to that list. From Bil Wright's title, Putting Makeup on the Fat Boy, you might think that Carlos is overweight and transgendered. A good guess, but not exactly right. Carlos is big and he does use cosmetics on himself. He is attracted to other boys, although still a virgin. His passion is applying makeup on other people. He is still in high school, but he plans to be a makeup artist to the stars. I love his spirit -- a combination of dreaming big, remaining optimistic and working hard for his goals against the odds.

From the moment that his best friend Angie suggests that he apply for a part-time job at the FeatureFace cosmetics counter in Macy's, Carlos has already leaped into the future, where he has aced the interview, been hired, is able to offer his sister Rosalia discounts and the whole thing is "beyond crazy fabulous!"

Carlos rushes to the fast food outlet where Rosalia works to tell her the good news, ignoring her coworkers stares: "[L]ike my head was spinning around while I was talking. All right, I'm not stupid. It was raining hard and I had on my black vinyl slicker and the hat that goes with it. And my mascara may even have been smudged a little from so much rain. So, I didn't look like any of the yuppies in the stupid place. Or those boys in their dirty uniforms. But I never look like anyone else, and that's the point. I don't want to look like anyone else."

Carlos is a teenager and so of course he messes up occasionally. Sometimes in a big way. I admire the way he takes responsibility for his actions when he makes mistakes. I was cheering for him all the way.

Readalikes: Will Grayson, Will Grayson (John Green and David Levithan) and Freak Show (James St. James).

We the Animals by Justin Torres

In We the Animals, Justin Torres conjures up the rough-and-tumble magic of brotherhood shared by three young boys, very close in age and in their loyalty to each other. Their Black mother was only 14 years old, and their Puerto Rican father was 16, when the eldest child was born. The family's poverty and outsider status barely register with the narrator, the youngest child. He feels the security of his brothers' fierce love, despite the marital troubles of their young parents.

The boys run wild and are mostly unsupervised. Life is a marvelous adventure. They make do with what they find, like making kites out of string and black garbage bags:

"We ran, slipped, the knees of our dungarees all grass stained, we got up, ran, choked ourselves half to death with laughter, but we found speed, and our trash kites soared. We flew for an hour or so, until daylight fully buried itself into night and all the light sank back, except for the stars and a toenail clipping of moon, and the kites disappeared, black on blackness. That's when we let go, and our trash kites really soared -- up and away, heavenward, like prayers, our hearts chasing after."

Their brotherly love is tested as the narrator grows older and explores his gay identity. "See how I made them uneasy. They smelled my difference -- my sharp, sad pansy scent."

A poetic coming-of-age story, both heartwarming and heartbreaking. I loved it.

Mr. Mendoza's Paintbrush by Luis Alberto Urrea and Christopher Cardinale

Mr. Mendoza is an elderly graffiti artist in the Mexican town of El Rosario. Unlike the old women who merely mutter their displeasure at immoral behaviours, Mr. Mendoza takes action, paintbrush in hand. His wry wit might pop up anywhere. On the sign into town, for example, "No intelligent life for 100 kilometers." The tale centers on an incident where two teenage boys get their comeuppance when they were caught spying on some young women bathing in the river.

The story was originally published in Urrea's Six Kinds of Sky collection. The imagined town, Rosario, is almost a character in itself. It is the same setting as that in Urrea's latest novel, Into the Beautiful North.

On top of a great story with an element of magic realism, this book has breathtaking art by Christopher Cardinale. It looks like woodcut printing; lots of black with rich greens, blues and ochre shades. Cardinale is known for his murals and his social activism. His art is absolutely perfect for the timeless feel of this story.

Cuba My Revolution by Inverna Lockpez and Dean Haspiel with Jose Villarrubia

Inverna Lockpez was 17 in 1958; she joined many other Cubans in rejoicing the overturn of Batista's corrupt government and the coming to power of Fidel Castro. Lockpez was not quickly disillusioned, even when the darker side of the revolution began to overshadow her idealistic hopes and dreams. Eventually, in the mid-1960s, she fled to the United States, where she has become a noted sculptor. Lockpez and two additional artists use the graphic novel format to fictionalize this memoir of a dramatic period in her life - and the lives of many other Cubans.

In the novel, Sonya is the protagonist. She wants to study art, but believes that she will serve the revolution better as a doctor. When Sonya is sent as a medic to the Bay of Pigs during the U.S. invasion, she witnesses the horrors of war. There is an atmosphere of such fear and suspicion that Sonya is mistaken for a CIA agent and is taken to Havana, imprisoned and tortured. Lockpez talks about this in a short interview that is available online at PRI's The World; she says the book depicts only the tip of the iceberg of what she experienced. Amazingly, this episode did not sour Sonya/Lockpez on the revolution - that came later.

The illustrations by Dean Haspiel are in a blocky, surrealist style in shades of gray with striking additions of the colour red, painted by Jose Villarrubia. See samples here (PRI's The World, again). Readalike: Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi.

The Dreamer by Pam Munoz Ryan and Peter Sis

When he was in his teens, Neftali Reyes chose a pseudonym, Pablo Neruda, in order to avoid confrontation with his father when his work appeared in publications. Neftali was a shy, daydreaming boy, bullied by his father. In this fictionalized biography for children, Pam Munoz Ryan uses narrative prose, magic realism and poetry to evoke Neruda's childhood in Chile. Czech artist Peter Sis contributes surreal illustrations that enhance the feeling of what it was like to grow up awkward around people, yet full of curiosity about the natural world. He was fascinated by beetles, pine cones, clouds... everything except his schoolwork. A summer trip to the seashore should have been heavenly, but Neftali's father had an ulterior motive: to toughen up his weakling son and young daughter. The two children were forced to spend hours in the ocean, struggling to keep from drowning. Neftali managed to defy his father and snuck away to read in the afternoons. I admired his strength of spirit.

The book is a pleasure to read. Scholastic Press 2010 USA edition is printed in green ink on cream paper with wide leading between lines. It can be enjoyed by readers from Grade 4 up to adult. A selection of Neruda's poems appear at the back.