I liked this book. At first I was concerned about the age difference and the thought of a high school age boy attracting an older police officer, but found the characters to be believable.

The only drawback was that I wanted the story to continue. I felt as if I was left hanging.

It took me some time to get into the flow of the book, and maybe for the book to really hit it's stride. Once there, about 1/3 of the way in, the book unfolds at a calm and deep pace that makes you think about the pace in LA, the pace of the deep waves coming in for the surfers, and the pace of the character's lives. The language and the timing, juxtaposed with the significant events occurring in Adam's life in the short time of the book were a large part of the story for me.

There are a lot of things to like about this novel, and reading about the first days after high school graduation brings back many memories, but I wanted to share how much I enjoyed reading it when I spent time thinking about how the language was paced. ( )

This was one of the first ever book I read. I was excited to read about coming out stories, and it would usually revolve around teenagers. I felt this book was written in two angles.

One was Adam dealing with his family. Heavy stuff.

The second one was Adam and Jeff, which was 'teen beat' stuff, which I thought was cute, except that I was already drained by the first stuff.

And maybe I was being silly, but as I continued to read the book, I kept wondering why not Adam and his best friend? Why did Adam have to wait around until he met a guy like Jeff?

But you know what.. for a book like this, which I have read years ago, and yet the story still lingers in my head, it has to be something special. Some books - I can't even remember the storylines. ( )

I found the book intriguing because this was a story about a style of life that I have not been privy to. However, Jeff, the policeman and his relationship with Adam was true and it comes across in the pages. I'll wait for the next novel... ( )

This deceptively amiable first novel tells the sometimes dark, affecting story of a gay teenager's last weeks of high school in a fictional suburb of Los Angeles. To his credit, author Aaron Krach avoids all the pitfalls of the typical gay youth novel; his Adam is already happily aware and accepting of his homosexuality and does not, during the course of the story, actually come out to anyone who does not already know. Instead, Krach casts a wider net, exploring Adam's complicated relationships with family, friends and, ultimately, his lover, to speak of the fundamental need for human connection.

Eighteen year old Adam Westman is a child of divorce. He and his world weary eleven year old sister, Sandra, live with their father, a school teacher who has suffered from severe depression all his life, almost to the point of being non-functional. Both children are somewhat estranged from their mother, who has remarried and is obsessively involved in her work running a successful film production company. It's not surprising then that Adam has grown up self-reliant and cynical. But fairly early in the story, a rather shocking tragedy forces the family, as well as several of Adam's high school friends and a dashing local police officer, into unexplored, alien, sometimes uneasy relationships with one another.

There is much to recommend HALF LIFE. Without exception, the characters are well defined and mostly quite engaging. The storyline, of a dysfunctional family pulling together and re-defining itself in a time of grief (also explored in Trebor Healey's lovely THROUGH IT CAME BRIGHT COLORS), is given enough breathing room to develop quite organically and believably. The love story, between Adam and Jeff, the thirty eight year old cop whom he meets under unfortunate circumstances, also plays out deliciously slowly. Unfortunately, the book's simple, poignant moments are offset by way too much extraneous dialogue (of the snappy, snarky variety) that slows down the forward motion of the story, not to mention making the book's gay characters (Jeff, Adam and his schoolmates Dart, Fran and Veronica) occasionally appear to be self-consciously glib and shallow. Plus, Krach portrays his only two straight adult female characters, Adam's mother Vivian, and Jeff's partner Sue, as outdated, vaguely offensive, stereotypes - the cold, de-feminised businesswoman and the desperate, calorie obsessed faghag, respectively.

But all in all, I found HALF LIFE to be very enjoyable, as it offers an emotionally resonant, stylish alternative to the glut of LGBT coming out novels on the market, to say nothing of its odd, but strangely moving, Raymond Carver-esque epilogue. Three and half stars. ( )