Marrying Tom

by Joseph Geraci

Tom is sixteen, a new arrival in a small American village of Madalin. He is a protestant and a rebel with a reputation. Danny is thirteen and from a well-established village family, a model Catholic boy and a member of the choir and the school swimming team. Set in the late sixties, the era of Vietnam, civil unrest, dope and The Doors. The two boys belong to rival gangs but, for all their differences, they are inevitably are drawn together. This is the fatal attraction of opposites.

Genres: Fiction

200 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2001

Reviews

[Siina · Rating 3 out of 5]

I must say that the cover doesn't work and has nothing to do with the content not to forget that the book's name is awful. I surely was skeptical with this when my friend gave it to me to read. Happily I must say that albeit the said things, the book was actually really good, and especially when it comes to the gayness depicted. This was the first time that an actual published book managed to have gay characters that were more than their sexual orientation. Love was hardly said out loud and most of all - the book wasn't about the boys being gay, but about everything else and they just happened to feel like that for one another.

I liked Tom and how he was so lost and made bad decisions all the time. He was a great counterpart to Danny, who was the perfect boy. I liked how Danny grew up and changed that image in a realistic way, though the time span of that was too fast. It's not really believable that Danny could've done all that when he was just thirteen, and perhaps we would've needed at least a couple of years to make the story line really work out in the best way. I'm saying this, since the plot was actually great, even though the childishness of the beginning made the end seem a bit aloof. I ended up devouring the book even with its flaws, and that's a great achievement and thus a praise to the book. We need more of these well written gay stories that are more about the plot and characters, instead of just the gayness part that usually makes everything else suck as a story.

[Nicolas Chinardet · Rating 3 out of 5]

They say you shouldn't judge a book by its cover. This is certainly true for this one. Other than the fact that the plot involves young men (much younger than the ones in the image - they are in fact mid-teens), the cover in no way relates to this gentle tale of coming of age in a quite, rural backwater.

Yes, Geraci has added a pinch of delinquency to spice things up a little, and a small degree of early antagonism between the main characters, but this is really a story of self discovery, told 30 to 40 years after the facts. The novel is set in 1968. As for "marrying", things never really go that far.

Throughout the book, Danny, the narrator, and Tom, the exotic new arrival in the small town, circle each other ever more closely until they fall in love. That's pretty much all there is to it. This is the one-sided story of this circling, told with a modicum of adult hindsight.

It's nothing ground breaking but it has a certain appealing freshness that makes the reader keep with it until the end.