What is Days of David Levithan ?
- Release Date: Sept. 8th 2003
- Publisher: Knopf
- Genre: Contemporary
- Pages: 185
It’s pretty fitting to start my reading David Levithan with his debut novel Boy Meets Boy. In fact, Boy Meets Boy just released its 10 year anniversary edition which has an excellent Q&A with Levithan in the back and I’ll be referring to a bit.
As I was reading this Q&A I began to think about how this novel is pretty significant to the “YA canon”, if there is one. In a lot of interviews about this book Levithan talks about how in 2004 there weren’t many books featuring queer teens, and if there were they usually leaned on the Bury Your Gay and the Gayngst tropes–that is a gay teen usually ended up dead or in another equally angsty situation at the end of the day. That’s not to say the intolerance doesn’t exist in the novel, but what Levithan does is offer a new narrative, a story of hope for those gay teens who never see positive stories about themselves.
Boy Meets Boy is exactly what it says on the cover. It’s about what happens when boy meets boy, but the plot is about if boy can keep boy. At the National Book Festival Levithan called this a “dippy happy love story” and I think that is the perfect description.
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