Title: There Was a Boy
Author: Justin Durand
Publisher: Self-Published
Length: 233 Pages
Category: New Adult, Gay Fiction
At a Glance: There Was a Boy had some good moments and ideas, but unfortunately the plot was too labored, the characters a bit too unrealistic in their speech and emotions, and the pacing was just terribly slow. Justin Durand has important ideas to impart, and it is my hope that he will seek out others to bounce his work off of in the future so that his stories become more cohesive and interesting.
Reviewed By: Sammy
Blurb: Tall, slim, shy Aaron Larkin has four objectives as he begins his eighteenth year: run a 5K in less than 15:21, graduate from high school, begin dating and come out of the closet. Two days after his birthday, a momentous first date with the man of his dreams convinces Aaron he’s in love and ready for marriage. However, Aaron must first address the damage he suffered from a difficult childhood.
“You aren’t super macho. More like…sweet and hot.”
That‘s how Aaron’s friend and neighbor Michelle, the smartest girl in the class, describes him. She promises he’ll meet someone soon.
Aaron is skilled at ignoring an unhappy childhood that left him serene on the outside and insecure, vulnerable and anxious on the inside. From middle school on, he concentrated on getting good grades and running faster but also gained more than enough experience with hopeless crushes on really nice straight classmates. Now, at the start of his last semester of high school, he’s ready for a real romance. With help from Michelle and a pooch named Daisy, he meets three seriously good-looking guys who invite him to join their running club. Daniel, Justin and Matthew are a few years older than Aaron but they quickly accept him into their social group. Life has programmed Aaron to be pessimistic but he gets his hopes up and for the first time he makes a connection with another gay guy.
Aaron knows “the course of true love never did run smooth,” but he lets himself forget and believe that it will for him. Naturally, when it doesn’t he blames himself.
There Was a Boy recounts a pivotal time when a teenager enters adulthood sooner than he’s ready, meets the man of his dreams and falls in love. Aaron has a lot to learn about sex and love. He’s positive he’s found the right teacher but an additional lesson awaits him and he must confront the wounds of his childhood before he can graduate to his new life.
Review: Justin Durand is a new author for me, and I had heard good things about his latest novel, There Was a Boy. A coming of age and coming out story, the book centers around Aaron, a high school senior, who has never had a relationship but knows he is gay. From a young age Aaron has lived with his paternal grandparents. He and his mother came to be with them after his father abandoned them and his mom had nowhere else to go. Already in their fifties, they took both Aaron and his mom in and supported them financially, providing both a home and just about everything else a boy could need—except affection. You see, Aaron’s granddad was not only an ex-marine and retired firefighter, which made him stern and aloof, emotionally, he was also an alcoholic. This was something no one ever spoke about, primarily because he was a high functioning alcoholic—one who rarely appeared drunk but definitely had a mean streak. Though there was no physical abuse of any kind, the emotional and verbal abuse Aaron would suffer most of his life would make him both awkwardly shy and, more often than not, deeply depressed.
At the suggestion of his granddad, Aaron spends the summer and first semester of his senior year abroad, perfecting his Spanish and living with a lovely family in Costa Rica. This was the first time Aaron had ever experienced a wholesome, loving family atmosphere, and a sense of belonging. It also solidified for him that he was most definitely gay, as he had a crush on Ramiro, his host family’s son, the entire time. When he returns home, Aaron makes the decision to begin a change—make more eye contact, try and connect with others, and be less timid. His best friend, Michelle, helps him all she can, and on one of their outings at the park, they run into a group of runners who invite Aaron into their running club. Aaron finds such freedom in running cross-country and had missed it while he was away, and so he instantly agrees.
The men who invite Aaron have no idea he’s only seventeen, and since they are all in their early twenties and beginning their careers, they assume he is in college already. Hence, it makes sense that one of the guys, Danny, begins to flirt with Aaron. When he discovers Aaron is not yet eighteen, they put their attraction on hold until Aaron’s next birthday a few months in the future. From the very beginning, Aaron is fully invested in Danny, and falls head over heels in love. Danny has never had a long-term relationship, usually dating casually, and rarely much more, but he also finds himself drawn to Aaron. As time goes on, the two men will begin a journey together, decide on couple’s counseling, and discover their connection runs very deep. However, Aaron still has to face coming out to his grandparents, and the possibility that he will lose everything—his home, his college tuition support, and the only “parents” he has ever known.
I’d like to begin this review by stating a few positives before getting to some others that gave me real pause. I felt the way in which the author chose to have Aaron gradually come out to friends, their parents, and a counselor before his grandparents was pretty spot-on given his circumstances. This was a gradual thing for Aaron, and since he was so very shy and private, both the timing and gradual reveal felt very right for him. I also liked how the author gave us the reasoning behind the running club thinking he was in college. At the time, I wondered why Mr. Durand opted to include so much info about the description of Aaron’s grandmother’s car, but then it all fell into place since she was a teacher at the college, and her car carried all the tags needed for on-campus parking, hence the men thinking Aaron was attending. There was a methodical way in which the author chose to unpack this story that kept it all fairly logical and easy to follow, as so many people came in and out of Aaron’s life in a relatively short period of time near the beginning of the novel.
As for Danny and Aaron themselves, the relationship they developed seemed to move a bit quickly, but once again, the author used both Danny and Aaron’s inner thought processes to explain why that was happening. There was never a moment when one had to guess at ulterior motives on either man’s part, and when they finally understood they needed to better communicate, that fell away to include more dialogue between them. The pacing of the story presented the first difficulty for me. Sometimes when a work is self-published, as this one was, there is a distinct lack of editing, and, unfortunately, this was the case. At times, many times, in fact, the story felt labored, the plot began to slow down and repeat itself, as if the author really needed us to understand again and again why Aaron was the way he was. Repetition of inner dialogue and feelings seem to be the way in which this author chose to drill home a key idea, and it got to the point where I felt tempted to abandon the story altogether rather than slog through material I had already read before yet again.
That brings us to the dialogue itself, and the fact that it was way too sophisticated for a seventeen year old boy, regardless of how mature he was. It was not only Aaron’s voice that seemed stilted and formal—his friends, the running club guys, all the characters under thirty—seemed way too mature for the novel. I just never got the sense this was a young man talking; it was way too oddly worded at times. Also, the first rule in using non-English phrasing is always translation. Instead, there were multiple passages that occurred during some rough sex scenes that disturbed Aaron, and we never got the gist of what Danny had actually said because it was in Spanish. Eventually there were a few words given, but well after the actual act, and so it was rather jolting to not be able to figure out what was so upsetting to Aaron.
But the strangest problem with this entire book was the idea that Danny, who was several years older than Aaron, changed his entire idea about commitment, marriage and, yes, even children, in the span of a few months of being with this newly-turned eighteen year old. At first, it was Danny who was so concerned, and noted that Aaron had a tendency to go overboard, to emotionally over-invest in their slow moving and growing relationship. Then, the boys went into therapy and boom, Danny was in love and ready to think about marriage. What was more disturbing was that this was not set up as an insta-love trope, but it quickly devolved into something similar. I was just so confused by the author choosing to make this the one and only relationship Aaron would ever have, and to have Danny do such a complete turnaround midway through the book, without any build toward the idea, was just a bit too much to swallow. This solidified the fact for me that the author would have done a great service to his work if an editor or a few trusted beta readers had stepped in to advise him.
Finally, I did find real value in the author’s attempt to lay out both a course of therapy for Aaron and the gradual time it took for that to happen. It was critical for Aaron to stop blaming himself and stop making excuses for his grandparents and distant mother. When he was finally able to make good headway with his therapist, and come to terms with the idea that he was abused, the choices he made for his future became justified and more realistic.
There Was a Boy had some good moments and ideas, but unfortunately the plot was too labored, the characters a bit too unrealistic in their speech and emotions, and the pacing was just terribly slow. Justin Durand has important ideas to impart, and it is my hope that he will seek out others to bounce his work off of in the future so that his stories become more cohesive and interesting.
You can buy There Was a Boy here:
[zilla_button url=”http://authl.it/B0721QZ74B?d” style=”blue” size=”medium” type=”round” target=”_blank”] Amazon [/zilla_button][zilla_button url=”http://bit.ly/2ACF4sN” style=”blue” size=”medium” type=”round” target=”_blank”] Barnes & Noble [/zilla_button][zilla_button url=”https://geo.itunes.apple.com/us/book/there-was-a-boy/id1249040127?mt=11″ style=”blue” size=”medium” type=”round” target=”_blank”] iBooks [/zilla_button][zilla_button url=”http://bit.ly/2ACFb7H” style=”blue” size=”medium” type=”round” target=”_blank”] Kobo [/zilla_button]
