Wolfram-Jaymes Keesing > Recent Status Updates

I don't think this book's for me. There's little change in narration between 13yo Stan and adult Charlie—as though they both thought and spoke the same. And the novel needed more editing, with too many wild syntactical errors interrupting the story. I'll finish, but...

Some rules for writing are there for reasons, and 'don't throw too many made-up names at your reader' is a good one. I've had to reread some pages multiple times to keep up with who is who, which is super distracting with a cast of, what, twenty-five characters already?

Also not liking that moments of introspect carry too long between speakers, disrupting the natural flow of dialogue. This could be done better.

I saw this in Bent Books, West End, and knew it was in my to-reads list here on Goodreads; so I bought it, and now I'm not exactly sure why I wanted to read it in the first place. I'm in the bad habit of picking up books that turn out to be largely superfluous in voice, you see; and, as should be evidenced by this update, picking up the same £üçk!πg woffle as the author.

(Yes, this is a long joke.)

I appreciate narratives skipping the 'confused' and 'coming out' parts of being queer. However, I usually find it's these narratives that invalidate labels and 'traditional' relationships in a way that makes queerness political instead of personal. So far this is totally that kind of novel. I get the impression it was directed from outside, and refuse to believe it's the best we'll see from Phil Stampler.