How far is too far when it comes to changing yourself to catch someone’s eye? Randy is a high femme gay kid who has been going to Camp Outland for years. As long as he’s been there he’s had a planet sized crush on Hudson, a hyper masc hottie who is tragically only into other masc guys. Over the rest of the year Randy has been working out and ‘manning up’ to turn himself into “Del”, a masc version of himself who is sure to catch Hudson’s eye. But to make this transformation work Del can’t act like Randy. He’s giving up a lot of the things that he loves to become Del. Will this plan work and is it worth changing who you are for someone else?
This was the May pick for the Reading Rainbow Queer Book Club that I run at my library. I was excited to read it because I really liked another of Rosen’s books, Lavender House. This book is a different genre and while I didn’t enjoy it as much as Lavender House, it was still pretty good. I full on think that Randy was nuts to change himself so much as he did just for some stupid boy, but that’s teenage hormones I guess. It was tough to listen to Hudson throwing out so much internalized toxic masculinity even at a safe space queer camp. We learn where he picked it up, from his crappy family, but it still felt like Hudson was stuck as a character. Should he not maybe have learned some of this stuff in the other years he’d been going to camp?
I have to keep reminding myself that these are teenagers doing dumb teenage things and that I did PLENTY of dumb teenage things when I was one as well. I’m looking forward to the book discussion we’ll have when we next meet!