Premises, Premises: Boy Meets Boy, by David Levithan.

I'm going to preface this post with a small note about how desperately I wanted to like this book. I love David Levithan ever since I read Everyday. I thought, sweet! Boy Meets Boy. It feels like a cute Valentines Day book and knowing Levithan's style of writing it won't be heavy handed or anything like that. And it really wasn't, but then again, it kinda was with how overly utopiotic it felt.

So, thinking of it that way, Boy Meets Boy was a bit of a let down.

Putting aside my love for David Levithan... it was still a little bit of a let down.

I've noticed that Levithan is a fan of premises. Most can be summed up in a sentence or two. Everyday: 'A' wakes up every morning in the body of a different person until 'A' falls in love with the Manic Pixie Dream girl trope. Will Grayson, Will Grayson: Two boys with the same name meet and it all leads to the world's most amazing musical. He's a friend of Libba Bray and was the inspiration for her story "Beauty Queens" which I'll cover later on in my readings. But in an interview she said one day he turned to her and said, "A plane full of beauty queens crashes on an island. Aaand.... go."

Boy Meets Boy is definitely one of his pet premise stories set up as a love story that takes place in a utopian society where almost everyone is accepted for who they are. Everything in this book is basically a unicorn tail. All rainbows and sparkles. The quarterback is a drag queen named Infinite Darlene and she's also homecoming queen. Vegetarians overtook the McDonalds and turned it into a Veggie D's. Homosexuality is almost completely accepted by the entire population (by everyone except the religious nuts). The list goes on.

Paul is the narrator of the story who is openly out (ever since his second grade teacher made the note that he was 'DEFINITELY GAY. and had a 'WONDERFUL SENSE OF SELF'). He meets Noah in a quirky way and they immediately fall into infatuation before Paul's ex-bf Kyle shows up and tries to win him back. It's basically a rom com.

It took me forever to figure out what was wrong with it, and then it finally hit me: It's a fan fiction.

Boy Meets Boy is basically David Levithan's version of fan fiction. It has a quick romantic build up between the two main characters, a wrench in the form of another boy, quirky outside characters that don't seem to completely fit, and a random song that filled up a few pages. So, in the end it's either a fan fiction or it's a John Hughes film. I honestly can't decide.

It's interesting to actually study this book though. In my pop culture class we've been discussing the four romantic comedy sub-plots and honestly this showed all the ear marks of a redemption and a pursuit plot. Which is interesting because that would mean that Noah is the one being pursued while Paul is the one who needs to be redeemed, turning this into a hetero-normative romcom played out as an LGBT love story. Which, if you think about it is kind of smart on Levithan's part, since he always hides a message about equality and love in his books.

In the end I really don't know how I feel about it. I can tell that Levithan was trying to create a book for gay readers that would be just like any other "straight book" but something about it felt off. Like he was trying too hard to create some form of utopia for his readers that felt a little too forced. I did like Paul and his love with Noah was cute and everything about the entire book was cute. Everyone was happy and cute. Overall I'm going to give this a 3.5 for a rating just because it felt weirdly forced and not quite... right. It's hard to explain what I'm not satisfied with it other than it just wasn't... enough...