Ricky’s Reviews > When You Call My Name > Status Update
Ricky
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The thing that really surprises me about this book is that this author is fully a decade older than I am and somehow this book feels so anachronistic that I thought it would have been written by someone a decade younger than I am. It's really confusing to me. But I suppose the idea is that he's repackaging the past in a way that feels palatable to young people today? It feels really strange sometimes.
— Aug 09, 2026 05:24PM
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Aug 09, 2026 06:28PM
Like I keep wondering if when people write these books that take place in different times, how much do they intentionally try to write them with the attitudes and I guess general mores the expected audience. It feels like pandering somehow but I suppose a certain amount of it is necessary, and maybe that's where the art comes in.
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Everyone is so afraid of alienating their audiences by challenging them to see the world through somebody else's eyes which honestly I thought was the whole point of reading in the first place. Anyway I guess there's a certain balance you have to strike
I think the the narration doesn't really help in the audiobook. Like the narrator is good when he is just reading, but ones he starts performing or doing voices I'm like girl please no you're doing too much
Oh my God girl, you cannot narrate an audiobook about the AIDS epidemic and not know how to pronounce kaposi's sarcoma, Jesus Christ
Another thing that annoys me about the narration is that a lot of the young gay characters are voiced with the exact same voice that narrators use to denote teenage girls or young women. It's really jarring and uncomfortable. I was actually convinced that the narrator had to be heterosexual because only a heterosexual male would make such a bone-headed choice, but on the narrator's Instagram the individual self-identifies as genderqueer so I don't know.