This review contains SPOILERS. BE AWARE!!!!!
Paul is a senior in high school in a small conservative Texas Christian town. He is a member of his church’s choir, the school’s bible club and an active member of his church. He has a girlfriend and everything is looking good until Manuel moves to town and things start to go a bit out of wack.
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Manuel, another senior, is an out gay kid who suggests starting a GSA at this school. His proposal immediately meets with protests from the principal and community members. He is also a Christian, which confuses Paul. Manuel coming to town and befriending him stirs his own hidden secrets and shakes his faith and perceptions to their core.
Through the debates and arguments Paul slowly comes through his many layers of denial that he is gay and that he is falling for Manuel. But just as he comes to this realization, Manuel is assaulted and left for dead by two of the school’s bullies. The assault awakens the school. The GSA starts, Paul comes out to his father (who storms out of a church for him), his very accepting grandmother, and his girlfriend. Manuel comes out of his coma and Paul and Manuel fall in love and start their beautiful relationship. Paul even starts to accept other parts of his identity like being called Pablo to re-embrace his Mexican heritage he was trying to desperately forget.
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This book spoke a lot to me coming from a conservative Christian background. Sanchez does a great job of laying out many of the arguments that are used by people who use the Bible as a condemning tool and he brings out even more counter-arguments. He obviously did his homework, which is much more than I can say for some of his opponents at times.
There are also many really good one or two liners in this book that make me laugh. Example?
Elizabeth braced herself on the table. "You mean you're a practicing homosexual?"
Manuel studied her a moment, as if debating whether to take her question seriously. "Well, actually, I think I've got the hang of it by now."
The one thing that I found I didn’t like about this book is the semi predictable plot line of “gay boy moves to town, stirs up trouble, befriends the one closet case, fall in love and at the end of the book the GSA is active and they fall in love happily ever after.” Also a lot of the characters are very 2 dimensional. The only person who has any real growth in the book is Paul; however this is a young adult book so I have to take that with a grain of salt.
One final thing I don’t like about the book is the treatment of the bashing situation. The bully later confesses the reason he doesn’t like gay people is that he was raped as a young boy by his uncle. I really didn’t like this because I realize that bullies are made, but there are a lot of people in the world who don’t like gay people who were not molested, touched, or have ever met a gay person in their life. I would hate people to have the impression that, like Karofsky on Glee, these bullies are anti-gay just because they were molested or that they are trying to hide their same-gender interests. In my experience, bullies do not discriminate against the downtrodden populations they terrorize. They go for the easy targets whether it be LGBT kids, the shy timid nerds, or other tokenized populations of a school.
So for this book I highly suggest it for students who, like me, come from conservative families and/or towns who are in high school or are trying to sort out the question of God with relation to sexual orientation. But at the same time don’t use this book as a straight up argument against anti-gay conservatives. Make sure you look at the passages it talks about and use the books listed in the back of the book for further research.
Sweet Dreams Boyz
Carry Thomas
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