That's my normal thoughts on the genre. Then along comes Kathe Koja again and writes a compelling and utterly absorbing little book like this where the most out there thing that happens is a fight at a town rally.
Lindsay is the school's queen bitch. She's used to getting what she wants. Kit is a quiet kid hiding a secret about his sexuality. He's persuaded to try out for the school play - Talk - and finds himself cast in the male lead opposite Lindsay.
Lindsay has just recently dumped her jock boyfriend and finds herself attracted to Kit. Things are not going to go well. As you might guess from that cleverly designed cover, the play attracts a fair amount of controversy.
The chapters are told in almost stream of consciousness narration from the POV of Kit and Lindsay alternately. There are also inserts of script from the play.
The voices telling us the story are clearly delineated, you can tell them apart easily from the rhythms and word choices. The story races along at a great pace and the more Lindsay fixates on Kit, the more tense things become.
The ending happily doesn't shut down all the storylines. Life rarely does this so it's nice to see this reflected. I wondered if the ex boyfriend had a more accurate gaydar than a straight guy would normally have. of course we only have his actions to judge him by as told through the two narrators and there's no way to know if there's more to my pondering on that.
We feel real sympathy for the two leads. Despite Lindsay being the queen of the school, we know her thought process and why she does and says the things she does. We know she's heading for a big fall and the inevitability of that is the lead source of tension in the book, even ahead of the "will the play go ahead" storyline.
As YA dramas about school life and regular normal people doing regular normal things go, this is really very good indeed. It left me wanting to know what happens next. That's always a good thing.
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