High school can be a tricky four years to navigate under the best of circumstances. For 15-year-old Jamie, there is an added complication: he is gay. We’re living in 2011, when acceptance of the LGBT community is continually reaching new highs, but coming out to family and friends can still be a very difficult and terrifying step, especially for a teenager. Jamie doesn’t want to wave flags or march in parades; he just wants to feel “normal” and make it through high school intact.
When a classmate discovers Jamie’s identity on a website for gay teens, he decides to preemptively dispel all rumors. To protect the secret of his sexuality, Jamie begins seeing a girl named Celia Gamez, who is rich, beautiful, and popular. Celia’s father happens to be in the business of developing new pharmaceutical drugs and lets slip one day that he is testing a new pill that can “cure” homosexuality. Jamie thinks this is the perfect opportunity to finally become “normal” and carry his relationship with Celia to its expected result. He steals some of the pills and secretly begins taking them before hanging out with Celia.
As you can guess, this plan doesn’t work out exactly as Jamie had imagined. The exact downward spiral is best read firsthand, so go get yourself a copy. I’ll wait…
It has been a slow week here at our humble blog, but we would like to take this opportunity to assure you that new reviews will resume within the next few days. We have been working on developing some exciting new features, creating a personalized logo, lining up author interviews, and doing some general blog maintenance that is probably incredibly boring to read about. Our blog has been live for less than three months, but the support from readers and authors has been phenomenal, for which we are endlessly grateful. Now we are working on building up an infrastructure that can showcase the bigger and better things that we hope to accomplish in the near future.
A friend and loyal reader of our blog requested that I review this book, and what a great suggestion that was. Timely and certainly a fun book to review! Her reasoning was: “Because if you like it, I’m buying it for all my friends who have kids.”
Considering this is book won the 2011 Caldecott Medal, I’m hardly the first person to sing its praises. If you are not familiar with it, you’ll be wanting to find a copy at a bookstore in your area.
I am declaring this week Children’s Book Review Week here at BwoB, both because I’m a little behind on my other reading and because it’s nice to try writing outside my usual realm of YA, genre, and select non-fiction. It should be noted that many of the titles I review this week were first recommended to me by fellow blogger 
After reading quite a few glowing reviews of this debut novel, I decided I had to give it a shot.
In an interview last week, Chicago novelist Marcus Sakey said ideas for his books emerge from “sheer panic” and called the challenge of finding an idea to write about every day for a year “daunting.” When he does choose an idea to work with, however, you can be sure it’s a good one, and that his execution will do it justice.
As our Twitter followers know, we live-tweeted the proceedings at Printers Row Lit Fest today. Here is a compilation of the tweets from a truly wonderful day! (Tweeted by 
Booksellers Without Borders
bookiegalore
Recidivist Reader
hardboundandgagged
ipsedixit
turpentinestevens
überliterate
Booksellers Without Borders 