The story of them
This has been a book that's been on my mental reading list for a long time. I've been a fan of David Levithan's work for the past five years or so. I still have a couple more of his books to hunt down, but let's just say I'm pretty familiar with his work.
A collection of stories, none of which were expressly written for publication, each character - from Gabriel who falls in love with the guy who works at Starbucks to John and Meredith's shared moment of pure bliss - is faced with all the delight and drama of falling in love. Ashley strings a lovesick Lucy along; Rachel imagines a world where the older Seth's girlfriend is out of the picture; Ian must hide his relationship with Thom from Thom's father, who is also conducting Ian's college interview. One character is forced to go to prom; a promiscuous couple decide to crash it; and a mellow couple end up skipping it. In these stories, the love that lasts and the love that fades, familial love and platonic love, are in a way all the same: they all lead to acts of courage, to a revelation, to introspection. Whether the love lingers or is forgotten, the point is simply that they met.
As explained by a forward, these stories were written for people as Valentine Day gifts, a practice that began while he was still in high school. This means that some of these stories aren't as strong as others. Reading his earlier work, readers can see the hallmarks of his writing develop and how they grew over time. He was still exploring his skill as a writer, which accounts as to why a handful of the stories don't work as well as others. Plots are a little too straightforward, characters are a little too flat, etc. Occasionally sentimentality overrules the story, dictating a safe but boring outcome. Fortunately, in the rest of the stories, there is more depth to the drama and characters. An extremely lyrical writer with an ear for the flow of the sentence, Levithan's prose shines in this collection. He has even written a couple stories as free-form poems, a form that emphasizes his unique turn-of-phrase that always feels natural and boundless. The last story of the collection, "Intersection," is a short meditation on the wonders of chance and fate, and the certainty of existence. It sums up nicely the theme of this collection: love should not mean, but be.
Rating: 4.5 first dates out of 5.
As explained by a forward, these stories were written for people as Valentine Day gifts, a practice that began while he was still in high school. This means that some of these stories aren't as strong as others. Reading his earlier work, readers can see the hallmarks of his writing develop and how they grew over time. He was still exploring his skill as a writer, which accounts as to why a handful of the stories don't work as well as others. Plots are a little too straightforward, characters are a little too flat, etc. Occasionally sentimentality overrules the story, dictating a safe but boring outcome. Fortunately, in the rest of the stories, there is more depth to the drama and characters. An extremely lyrical writer with an ear for the flow of the sentence, Levithan's prose shines in this collection. He has even written a couple stories as free-form poems, a form that emphasizes his unique turn-of-phrase that always feels natural and boundless. The last story of the collection, "Intersection," is a short meditation on the wonders of chance and fate, and the certainty of existence. It sums up nicely the theme of this collection: love should not mean, but be.
Rating: 4.5 first dates out of 5.
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