Geography Club by Brent Hartinger

Well, I'm not quite sure why is Bill is having us read cliche, overly stereotyped teen fiction. Is gay content really so hard to find that we are starved for anything? Especially when it comes to gay teen fiction. Yes it was a quick read because it was written in first person, as if it were the main character's journal, and he addresses the reader on several occasions and even references what he has written about previously, like (see chapter one section one) so it makes it seem like a very genuine account of someone's personal experience, written in very casual language. But I just couldn't get over the fact that everything was a caricature or a stereotype. The whole high school scenario was an over simplified, black and white battle ground of cliques. With well defined names like The Jocks and The Cheerleaders and The Left Wing Radicals and The Nerdy Intellectuals, etc. Your stature of popularity was all that mattered and well defined from your clique, Land of the Cool Respectable and The Outcasts. A school with 800 kids has one outcast that everyone actually throws food at and picks on? That doesn't really happen. And people transcend their cliques and their lives aren't defined by popularity. And popularity certainly isn't as fickle as one day you are the school hero for hitting a home run and the next day you are eating with the one loser and shunned. Sometimes those are aspects of high school but it isn't real high school in its entirety. That is TV, over-simplified stereotyped high school. It is so much more complex than that and making high school that one-dimensional just makes generic characters and story points.

I just don't see how a book that writes everyone as a stereotype and speaks in generalities and cliches can ever hope to do something real. It was a struggle to find a real genuine moment with these characters that would allow me to connect with them. Maybe it is hard for me because I didn't feel like that in high school because I wasn't aware of my sexuality so explicitly, but I do know that actual high school wasn't like this book. I suppose the few moments that held some truth for me were the moments when Russel spoke in his plain language about his feelings. Like when he described what it was like to kiss Kevin compared to Trish and then said he wasn't going to tell us what happened because it was none of our business, but then backtracked and said, actually if he was reading this book and someone said that it would make him mad so he would give us more details after all. That felt like a high schooler writing a book, not an old man pretending to be in high school again.

It seems that reviewers on amazon found the book cute and could identify with some of the situations. Maybe gays do just need something a little more familiar sometimes?