Review of "A Secret Edge" by Robin Reardon

I am going to try and put up a post almost everyday by either reviewing something I saw, read, or visited. I won't always have something up, but I hope to keep going for a while.

"A Secret Edge" by Robin Reardon

This happened to be the first romance book I have read in a very long time. If I recall it is also the first gay romance I have ever read and I must say it's decent. The plot was about a boy, Jason Peele, who is just figuring out he is gay and is coming out of the closet. It goes follows his life as he tries to keep his lead in track, stays away from bullies, comes out of the closet, and falls in love. Reardon begins the book automatically showing the confusion of Jason Peele by showing the wet dreams he has of David Bowie. Jason then goes through and tries to figure out who he is and along the way he meets an Indian, named Raj, who is also on the track team and they fallin love. While their relationship grows, both Raj and Jason learn from each other and mutually grow as their personalities conflict. Jason learns about Gandhi and the imporance of keeping true to himself and Raj learns to be more humble. While the love unfolds things of course happen in Jason's life. He comes out to his aunt and uncle (his parents are dead from an accident when Jason was 2), and how they treat his coming out. It also fallows school bullies and how they go after gay kids in schools. It also shows Jason making wrong decisions while being a teenager.

It seems the book is mainly geared toward the teenage crowd. The writing seems very simplistic and extremely easy to read. Reardon occasionaly skips important steps in the plot and assumes that the audience will just be able to follow. At some points I had to go back just to understand what was happening as sometimes between two sentences 10 minutes have passed without a mention of what happened. The book was also very unrealistic. The love affair between Raj and Jason seemed to not reflect reality, and the high school that Jason went to also seemed unrealistic. Almost everyone in Jason's life was understanding of him being gay which does not generally happen in modern day life in California. Even with the fallacies in logic, taking the fictional roller coaster of emotions was very good. It made you wish a world like this did in fact exist in which bullies were easily scared and where half of the track team was gay. Unfortunately that day is long ways away and we will wait for it to come.

As this book is concerned, I would say if you are bored with nothing else to do then it is worth picking up and having a read through of it. If you are not very bored and have other things to do, then I wouldn't really bother with this book.

-Aram the Garmo