For a book that I couldn’t put down for two days, I sure had a lot of complaints about Alex Sanchez’s RAINBOW BOYS.
I think Sanchez has a profoundly tin ear for dialogue, especially considering all the praise heaped on this book. Mixed in with recognizable teen slang — “poop” as an adjective or a cutesy interjection, for example — are a constant stream of lines that no teen — or person, really — would ever utter.
This is compounded by an odd lack of specificity in a number of key scenes. Like, on page two we hear about our first of three protagonists, Jason, having made the big step of calling a gay teen hotline… and “asking questions for hours.” Well, what did he ask?! I just met this character! I’m trying to get into his head, and Sanchez is making things entirely too vague for that to happen.
Related to that, I had the darndest time figuring out when the book was set. I wrote recently about books that are set at a very particular moment in the recent past; I gather that RAINBOW BOYS is set in the early-to-mid ‘90s, but only by piecing together some little details like the boys making each other cassette tapes (yet having some CDs), one boy having his own computer but this being an impressive fact (yet the boys instant message), and a passing mention of “protesters picketing Congress for AIDS funding.” (If only!) But most of the book was in the more timelessly generic world of most YA novels, so I still don’t know why Sanchez set his nearly two decades ago; the story would’ve worked as well with the kids trading mp3s. If there was some sort of 1990s Zeitgeist here, it went over my head.
I even had issues with parts of the plot — namely, an alcoholic father who was so cartoonishly villainous that I just didn’t buy it.
But it’s the plot that kept me turning the pages and ensured that I will be reading the first sequel when I get the chance. On top of a romance with exactly the kind of little escalations, misunderstandings, hurt feelings and elation that I devour like candy were tons of nice little touches… like unrequited love for a best friend, unprotected sex (a plotline handled extremely well), and the not-so-easy feat of three lead characters who were quite distinct, each of whom I believed in and cared about.
Jennifer Hubbard (who, coincidentally, is the person who recommended RAINBOW BOYS to me, in a blog comment) has written about how hard it is to pull off a novel jumping between time periods or narrators, because each piece has to be as interesting as the others; Sanchez manages that admirably.
This is, in short, the book for which our “Flawed does not preclude interesting” category was designed. Let’s hope that the writing improves with the sequels, and that the beautiful romance and pathos keep on coming.
-->Feed me text
August 29, 2009 at 7:32 am
That is pretty frustrating when you are trying to figure out in what time period the book is set the whole time.
August 29, 2009 at 12:49 pm
Yeah, it drove me kind of crazy, because the cassette thing happened early, so I kept expecting there to be a *reason* for the book to be set so early… but I never figured it out.
I’m reading Nancy Garden’s ANNIE ON MY MIND right now (so! good!) and having some of the same difficulties, but I’m pretty sure it’s actually set when it was written (published 1982), and that this wouldn’t have been confusing to readers at the time… it just, early on, struck me as *so* old-fashioned that I wondered if it was set in the ’50s or something. It can be very distracting from the story.
August 30, 2009 at 1:57 am
Since, for me, RAINBOW BOYS is one of the better books of its genre, not that there are all that many in that group anyway, after reading your post and comments, I went back tonight and read through a few chapters. I had remembered that when I read it the first time (I’ve read it several since then), I thought the language of the characters was a bit off. In looking at it tonight, I wasn’t that bothered even though it still has a “Leave It to Beaver” quality to it.
I think there are several reasons for this: 1) it was Sanchez’ first novel, 2) teenage slang changes quickly, so I think he was trying to avoid that as much as possible as well as keep it as clean as possible in order to get the book on the shelves; and 3) Sanchez is in his 50s, so being adept at teenage vernacular may not be his forte.
I think you’re right in that he was trying to keep the story as time-neutral as possible. That’s really hard when a story includes details that involve every day items that do change with time. I wasn’t bothered at all about the cassettes because until two years ago, I owned a car which I had bought in 1996 that had a cassette player in it, and RAINBOW BOYS was published in 2001 when cassettes were still around. What I noticed was the gay magazine that Kyle’s mom found, “Honcho”, which is no longer published.
I think when it comes to this book we need to think what Sanchez was doing: trying to get a book published and put on the shelves so that gay kids (and others) would find characters that they could identify with and help them deal with their own lives, something that very few other books do.
I know that when I read RAINBOW BOYS, even though it’s hard as an adult not to read critically, I kept thinking, “I wish there had been books like this when I was in school.” I think Sanchez’ technique improves in his books that have followed, but I still have found the language somewhat flat and the stories at times didactic (especially in THE GOD BOX), even so, it’s important to remember who his main audience really is.
August 30, 2009 at 2:45 am
Hey Trip,
Yeah, I think it’s a question of what we’re reading for: if I were a school librarian, for example, I would most certainly want to purchase RAINBOW BOYS for my school. It’s doing something important.
And not only because it’s a gay-positive book (which, really, is enough for me to think it belongs in schools, and to feel a sense of solidarity and affinity with Sanchez whatever else I think of his book), but I also think — although I haven’t yet read broadly enough to be sure — that it’s expanding the boundaries of the kinds of plots gay teen books can have. I suspect that’s true of the unprotected sex storyline, and I suspect that’s a big part of why the book got so much praise. I think that matters.
I also think, though, that the writing really is amazingly flat at the line level, in a way that detracts from the story: it makes it harder for me to identify with these characters at points.
On the datedness thing… if it’s not consciously set in the early-to-mid ’90s, then I really do think it’s just sloppy. AIDS protesters, really? There hasn’t been a national gay rights march since 1993! (Until now.) That kind of stuff bothers me, maybe more than I should. It’s a believing-in-the-world thing for me.
Anyway, that’s how it is that (like Twilight, in a way) I could feel simultaneously a bit contemptuous of the book as I was reading and also be fully engrossed.
Thanks for coming by to comment!