Is He or Isn’t He? After reading this piece of corny garbage, you really won’t care.

To sum up this trite attempt at “hip” contemporary gay young adult fiction, I’ll quote Dorothy Parker: “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.” While reading this book, I was sorely tempted, on numerous occasions, to simply grab it and hurl it against the nearest wall. This is like a gay version of the Gossip Girl books: all the characters attend posh Peppington Prep, they’re all rich beyond belief because their parents, who are never around, are all fashion designers, television stars, or multibillionaire entrepreneurs, and they’re all shallow, materialistic label queens.

The author, John Hall (if you want to laugh, check out his cheesey website), packs the book with every conceivable stereotype about gay guys, straight guys, straight girls, Italian people, rich people, people in the fashion industry, people in the entertainment industry… Nothing about this book is original. In fact, on the Acknowledgements page, Hall even mentions that the idea for the book came from a friend who “pitched” him a “two-sentence premise” and asked him to come up with an outline for the story. From the looks of it, he didn’t get much further than the outline. Here is the plot (such as it is): Anthony and Paige, best friends entering their senior year, both develop a crush on Max, the hot new guy in school. They don’t know whether he’s gay or straight (hence the title), so—instead of simply asking him—they hatch asinine scheme after asinine scheme to find out his sexual orientation. After lots of shopping trips, glamorous soirées, and exclamation points (I estimate that Hall uses about three per page), they discover Max’s sexual orientation. Hall manages to sustain this idiocy for almost 300 pages.

This book contains almost no redeeming qualities, except that one character in the book recommends that another character read K.M. Soehnlein’s The World of Normal Boys, which is actually a good book. Surprisingly, Hall also thanks Libba Bray (the author of A Great and Terrible Beauty, which Jeff praised highly in an earlier post) on his Acknowledgements page. Hall, who works as editor in the publishing industry, obviously knows what good literature is, so I’m left to wonder why his own novel is so utterly lousy. This book is the literary equivalent of Saved by the Bell, only more damaging. Avoid this at all costs.

Jim