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Bad Boy

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Hockey is the only game worth playing in the rough-and-tumble prairie town of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. When sixteen-year-old A.J. Brandiosa makes the Triple A team of his dreams, he can hardly believe that his life is finally coming together.
And then it falls apart. A.J. makes an unexpected discovery about his best friend and teammate, Tulsa Brown, and he can't keep his rage and fear from spilling onto the ice. An aggressive defenseman is becoming a violent one. . .
An explosive novel by award-winning author Diana Wieler that looks honestly at teenage sexuality and the world of amateur hockey.

191 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

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About the author

Diana Wieler

11 books4 followers
Diana Wieler was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 1961. She moved to Calgary as a teenager and, after high school, took the Television, Stage, and Radio Arts Program at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology. Working in radio in Calgary, and then for a newspaper in Saskatoon, proved to be valuable training for a writing career, which she now pursues full time.

Diana's first published short stories: A Dog On His Own, (Prairie Publishing Company), To the Mountains by Morning, was published in a third grade reader (Nelson Canada) and was the winner of the CBC Literary Competition in 1984; The Boy Who Walked Backwards (Coteau Books) was published in the Prairie Jungle Anthology and won the Vickey Metcalf Award in 1985; The Finder, (Houghton Mifflin) and The Scream were both published in The Canadian Children's Annual.

Diana's most recent works include Last Chance Summer (Western Producer, Parie Books), a winner of the Ebel Memorial Reward; Bad Boy is the winner of the Governor General's Literary Reward for Children's Literature in 1989 and the Ruth Schwartz Foundation Reward for Excellence, the Canadian Library Association for Young Adult Book of the Year in 1990 and also optioned for Canadian Film Rights; Ran Van the Defender, which won the Mr. Christie's Book Award; and Ran Van: A Worthy Opponent, which were published by Groundwood Books.

She has also ventured into screenwriting and is working on the script of Ran Van: the Defender for O'Meara Productions Ltd. A picture book edition of her story To the Mountains by Morning was published by Groundwood books in October 1995.

Diana Wieler is currently living in Winnipeg, Canada, with her husband and her son, Ben.

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5 stars
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22 (22%)
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36 (36%)
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
Profile Image for Jennifer.
392 reviews8 followers
January 3, 2010
The GoodReads review function asks me what I learned from this book. Here is a list of things I learned:

1.) It is totally a good idea to use the phrases "the blond boy" and "the boy" to refer to your characters, rather than pronouns or their first names.

2.) Point of view does not need to be consistent. You can spend most of the book in your protagonist's third person limited point of view, switching occasionally to his best friend's, but when you feel like it you can also switch to the point of view of a hockey coach or the protagonist's crush for a few sentences or paragraphs for no discernible reason (but not for scenes where those characters actually have a central role).

3.) The words "palatable" and "palpable" are totally interchangeable.

4.) You should always make hockey, a very exciting sport, sound as boring as possible when you write about it.

5.) Human sexuality is completely figured out in elementary school; if, at 16, you begin to think you might be gay, you're wrong, and real gay people will tell you so.

6.) Hair color should always be described using a thesaurus. Why use "brown" when you can use "mahogany," "chestnut," or "nutmeg"?

7.) "Bad Boy" is the cleverest and toughest nickname a high school boy could ever have.

8.) Gay characters who are not one of your main characters are sleazy and abusive. They are Bad. However, if your heterosexual protagonist attempts to rape his best friend's sister as the culmination of a novel's worth of terrifying violence, you should still root for them to get together, and be happy when she forgives him.

9.) Never bother to give characterization to anyone other than your handful of main characters, but be sure to tell us all about how your protagonist feels very comfortable on his hockey team full of characters who never speak and an abusive coach.

and finally,

10.) Never write the pivotal scenes in your novel. Instead, end a chapter right before the scene, then start the next chapter after it and have characters allude to it in dialogue.

I feel so informed!

On the plus side, this novel made me feel a whole lot better about my own writing. Pick it up if you need a self-esteem boost.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Profile Image for Alex Doenau.
827 reviews36 followers
August 16, 2012
Incredibly dated, very brief novel about a boy who discovers that his best friend is gay and sublimates his own homosexual desire by being violent in the hockey rink. Most of the action occurs off the page, and Wieler makes the mistake of focusing her narrative on a colourless protagonist and making the gay best friend storyline about anyone but the gay character himself.

The gay themes are fairly progressive for the time of publication, and Wieler is generally sympathetic to Tully, but there are some equally wrong-headed views here; A.J. ends up remaining homophobic even as he's jealous of Tully's general ease, Tully takes a generally unrealistic approach to his situation, and the lessons that the novel has about how you know when you're gay (if a gay person tells you you're not gay, you're not gay) are just so harmfully over-general that they beggar belief.

This book doesn't suck but it gradually squanders its promise into nothing. But at least I learned what a goon was.
Profile Image for Courtney.
208 reviews1 follower
January 15, 2011
A.J. Brandiosa isn’t close to anyone like he is to Tulsa. When A.J. and Tulsa both make the Triple A hockey team, everything seems perfect. Until A.J. learns a secret Tulsa wasn’t ready to share: that he’s gay.

Despite being twenty years old, Wieler’s Bad Boy remains thoughtful and fresh. When A.J. uncovers Tulsa’s secret, the familiar narrative of the underdog sports team is complicated by questions of sexual identity. Much to her credit, Wieler writes a very human novel with complex characters. Neither A.J. or Tulsa fit flat, jock stereotypes and Wieler works very hard to get inside their heads. While most of the story is third-person omniscient narrated by A.J., occasional scenes are narrated by Tulsa. This sets up competing protagonists whose actions and reactions govern the steady pace of the book. The real success of Bad Boy is the exploration of this relationship, focusing on how A.J. and Tulsa adjust to change. To do this, Wieler doesn’t shy away from ugly issues (particularly homophobia and violence) that stem from the discussion of Tulsa’s sexuality. At first, A.J. is angry at Tulsa and tries to ignore his behavior, thinking Tulsa is just playing around like when he experimented with drugs. Later A.J. is embarrassed, worried that people might find out and transfer negative associations onto him. On the ice, A.J. is violent, expending his emotions through brute force. While this dialogue is uncomfortable (if not offensive) it works up to the real subtext: Tulsa’s revelation makes A.J. question his own sexuality. There’s a surprisingly mature scene (I don’t mean adult content) where A.J. tells Tulsa he loves him and asks how he knew he was gay. While, like author David Levithan, I think it’s unfortunate that LGBT books rarely exist without discussions of self-hatred, I appreciate that Bad Boy throws itself into asking (and answering) provocative questions: how does our sexuality define us, how does it define our relationship to others, can sexuality be negative, should sexuality be negative, and how do we embrace differences?

My major criticism of Wieler is that her writing is sometimes gendered. As a female author penning male characters, she seems to try too hard to be gender authentic and she ends up stereotyping. In one scene, A.J. is eyeing a girl and describes her butt as a “pert, upside-down heart” (7). Beyond the stupidity of this comparison, it doesn’t read in character. It sounds like something Wieler imagines a teen boy might say, not something that I believe from A.J. A second criticism is that I felt uncomfortable at Wieler’s quick dismissal of a scene of date violence. At one point A.J. gets carried away making out with a girl named Summer despite her clear vocalization that she wants to stop. Later in the book, Summer forgives A.J. with little to no consequences. I wished for more resolution here.
Profile Image for L.A. Fields.
Author 32 books22 followers
October 15, 2023
Diana Wieler's *Bad Boy* is a memorable and unique young adult novel that deals with anger issues, drug use recovery, and other self-destructive urges in realistically digestible ways for teens.

Each character is fully realized: the main "bad boy" hockey enforcer, his gay best friend, and his precocious little sister. Their struggles and secrets force them to grow through the discomforts of adolescence towards a better way to be.
Profile Image for kels .
427 reviews4 followers
June 11, 2021
Another one for my Children's Lit class. An interesting historic perspective, I guess? I definitely went to school with guys like AJ. The Saskatchewan small-time hockey setting was pretty bang-on.
149 reviews1 follower
May 6, 2022
Strange book. While it taught me a lot about hockey -- I acknowledge I know very little, and the author's descriptions were clear and understandable -- it really showed me a different side of a Canadian's view of being a teenager. The audience for this book appears to be 15 - 17 year old high schoolers. The students in this novel are all inv0lved in lots of heavy drinking, with little consequence. It's odd that kids 15 and 16 years old can routinely show up in bars, get drunk, and no adult call it out. There's also much drinking and driving, again with no consequence. And while I suppose some violence is endemic in hockey, the amount of teenage violence that is accepted by the community is in my view a sad commentary. And then there is an attempted sexual assault on a 14 - 15 year old girl that is not clearly condemned. I can't believe this is a prize-winning book.
Profile Image for Victoria.
121 reviews37 followers
February 25, 2020
Maybe I'm reading too much into this old ass book but i don't think we are supposed to believe the main character is not queer, he has pretty strong feelings for his friend, the author says when he thinks about his friend at night he feels heat. I think it's a representation of two type of gay people those who accept they are gay even if they are still in the closet and those who prefer to lie to themselves. Anyway I think tul did great to keep away from AJ, that boy was a mess.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Profile Image for Matthew Douglas.
1 review
June 13, 2020
As a queer hockey fan I loved this book. Its definitely a piece from it's time but still handles social issues pretty well. Though not the most introspective it was short enough that just finding out what happens next lead me to finishing it in one day.

Spoilers below
***
I actually like that the main character and his friend didn't get together. The questioning felt realistic to the situation but any romance between them seems to pretty to fit in with the realism of the book.
Profile Image for Sam.
34 reviews
June 20, 2021
If you want a book about a homophobic kid struggling with his sexuality who never resolves anything then this is the book for you. I would have dropped this a long time ago if I didn't have to read it for class. It's filled with terrible similes and seems like the author used a thesaurus when describing the characters. Don't bother reading. Hard pass.
Profile Image for Stephen.
1,181 reviews226 followers
October 8, 2014
A.J. Brandiosa and his best friend Tully have finally made it! They're on the Moose Jaw Saskathewan AAA hockey team The Cyclones. All that working out has finally gotten rid of A.J.'s pesky baby fat and he's starting to like the way that he looks and the way that he can accomplish things on the ice that have always eluded him. Tully has always been the popular showboat both on and off the rink. But when A.J. gets a bit too physical in an early game and gets labelled as a "Bad Boy" and the team's enforcer it's A.J.'s name that gets in the paper and A.J kinda likes the attention. But then A.J. discovers that his best friend is gay. Worried about his own reputation and even more worried by his feelings about Tully that he now sees in a different light, A.J. must re-evaluate everything in his life and how's he gonna do that when it was always Tully that he could confide in?

Born and raised in rural Michigan, when I first heard about this book I was intrigued. What's not to like about an award winning coming out story that features masculine rural guys and hockey players no less? Then I read some of the negative reviews...

One 2012 review called this 1989 Governor General Award winner incredibly dated. After reading the book myself I believe that that's a bit unfair. Growing up in a remote rural area is a bit like growing up in the past and I'm pretty certain that much of the way that Moose Jaw is painted in this book is just as true today as when the book was first published.

Another reviewer objected to Tully's telling A.J. that A.J. wasn't gay and because Tully was a gay guy, A.J. took his word for it. Fact is, I believe that A.J. really wasn't gay, though he might have been willing to try it for Tully. A.J. was attracted to women throughout the book. Yes, he had some erotic thoughts about Tully as well but they mostly unsettling for him. And the guy's had a dynamic where Tully did tell A.J. how to think about things. This was really just an extension of their instigator-follower type of relationship.

On the whole this was really a well thought out story of two guys redefining their relationship in the aftermath of one of them coming out. For me it read as realistic and insightful and still as relevant as when it was published over 20 years ago. I'd recommend it.
Profile Image for Manly Manster.
240 reviews8 followers
January 10, 2020
This book showed what happened, but it was lacking in showing the thoughts and feelings of the characters.

One of main characters acts aggressive on the hockey field. While it is happening, the character wasn't thinking anything aggressive or meaningful to make his actions stand out as important, so I started skipping ahead in the book. However, because of character's aggressive behavior he is later called "Bad Boy" in a newspaper article. That aggressive scene was apparently supposed to be an important event, it's even the title of the book. Unfortunately, the book is written in a style that doesn't often show what is going on in the mind of the characters. I didn't realize the character was being "aggressive" I thought he was just playing hockey.

A lot of the scenes in the book seemed like book filler, because they didn't seem to have importance to the plot. Such as every scene with the coach. Especially scenes that were written from his point of view, when he was not the main character or important in the book.

The Bad Boy's dad is dating a MUCH younger girl. The Bad Boy is upset about this but we don't know why. We just see that he is. I was left wondering what his reasons were.

This book showed what happened, but it was lacking in showing the thoughts and feelings of the characters.
Profile Image for Lucy.
1,764 reviews33 followers
February 6, 2016
This was a rec from a friend of mine who knew I would like the hockey part if nothing else. If this hadn't been recommended to me, I never would have found it on account of it being published in 1989. And it really shows - this book doesn't date well. A lot of the views are still held today but they're not quite as acceptable as it is in the book to voice them.

From a book POV, I have to say that I didn't enjoy it that much. AJ's homophobia was unpleasant to read and I wanted to shake him half the time. From a hockey POV, I was really interested into the glimpse of minor hockey and the intense pressure, not just from the team and the coach but from the outside as well. The fact that everyone read that same reporter who wrote about minor hockey just highlighted how much of a big deal the hockey team was in that small town.

What I did like was the part at the very end where AJ recognised the similarities between him and his Uncle Mike and it made me hopeful that AJ would grow up, if not accepting of his own (possible?) bisexuality, then at least more accepting of his friend.

I give this book three stars. I finished it and I sort of enjoyed it, but I enjoyed the end most of all.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Profile Image for Han.
783 reviews25 followers
February 6, 2016
I always worry about queer lit from a certain era, you know? But Wieler surprised me. AJ reacts to the news that his best friend is gay exactly the way a boy his age would - especially one from his time. Even all these years later, though, AJ's response rang true for me. The author handles Tully's queerness with grace and respect, and part of that respect is acknowledging that people can be crappy about it. For such an early addition to the queer YA canon, I am so, so impressed that it doesn't reduce homosexuality to just sexuality, nor sexual orientation to black and white boxes. It's a little dated, sure, but I would absolutely hand this to a Teen Of Today.

Moreover, Wieler's hockey writing is delightful. It's easy to picture the plays as she writes them, but the story doesn't get bogged down with overly-detailed hockey sequences. Really deftly executed. It's not a complex book, but it was a delight to read - once I had time, I breezed right through it.

***minor spoilers***

Again surprising for a book of this time with this subject matter, NOBODY. DIES. I kept expecting the career-ending injury, a deadly or debilitating car or bike accident, a coma, an infection, death. But oh my god. This is so HOPEFUL.
2 reviews
March 6, 2009
How well do you think you know your best friend?AJ a young teenage boy who plays hockey gets caught up in taugh situation when he has dicisions to make.I really enjoyed this book titled "Bad Boy" mainly because I can connect to most of the situations AJ gets placed in.This book gives a few examples of reality and makes the reader wonder what might happen if they were placed in the chareters place having to deal with the taugh situations.A lesson or two could be learned from this novel.When AJ discovers his best friend is gay after all the wonderful years they spent toghter AJ started to question their friendship.AJ thought about why his best friend did not inform him that he was gay before.If you experianced friendship difficulties and need advice on how to deal with your situations "Bad Boy" is the book for you.
Profile Image for Alex.
4 reviews
March 6, 2009
Have you ever encountered something that you found out about your best friend? In the book "Bad Boy" AJ finds out a secret about his best friend Tully. When Aj makes the hockey team, he finally thinks that his life is getting better. When he thinks it has changed, something he finds out about his friend Tully hits him. The secret has AJ acting more wiolent and his friendship is at stake. AJ uses hockey to relieve all of his anger and frustration so he soon become the Bad Boy. I would reommend this book to anyone who is interested in drama and mystery.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews

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