In the book WHAT HAPPENED TO LANI GARVER, Claire is back for high school and meets a new kid named Lani Garver. Lani is not your normal teenage kid. He is gay, and people gay-bash him all the time.

In this book you learn a little about Lani and his past life. It does not explain every detail of his life, but you learn that Lani has had more problems than you can imagine.

Lani and Claire go through many adventures in this book and none are pretty. Between Claire's issuse and the issues of Lani, they become great friends who help each other through everything, untit that one night... ( )

Could have been a decent story, but didn't quite make it there. Totally repetitive of the old tropes regarding gender non-conforming characters. He's magical! He's incredibly beautiful! He's an angel! He can solve all your problems! He is the victim of repeated horrendous violence! Other characters are drawn in a frustrating manner as well. The concept of convenient recollection is overused to an extreme. Macy, the main character's best friend, is bordering on psychosis with her invention of events that never happened and complete inability to comprehend that she might be mistaken.

I definitely wouldn't recommend this to a gender non-conforming teen as a supportive book. People who like mysteries and books where teens go through horrible experiences might enjoy this, but it's not fast paced enough for many readers. ( )

Richie's Picks: WHAT HAPPENED TO LANI GARVER by Carol Plum-Ucci, Harcourt,
September 2002

It was late morning on an early summer Sunday in 1974. I had finished my
first year away at college and was sitting in the passenger seat of my little
brother's pickup. Jimmy was giving me a tour through the dusty back lanes of
our new town. As we came around a curve on a winding road, we encountered a
pair of seagulls weaving on the pavement as if broken windup toys--each
appeared to be limping on one leg with the opposite wing outstretched to keep
from totally falling over. There was a booming that sounded like fireworks.

The sound of shotguns became clearer as Jimmy dodged dozens more birds--dead
and dying. He turned onto a dirt trail leading to a clearing, where I got to
meet some of his new buddies. As I was told during introductions, they were
busy working on altering the migratory patterns of the seagulls. I politely
declined their offer to take a shot or two.

For years my parents had been itching to move from the suburban house in
Commack where we'd spent the previous decade. But anxious to avoid
disrupting my scholastic program, as well as the extracurricular and
community activities I'd been deeply involved in, they patiently awaited my
finishing high school and departing for UConn before heading off to find the
East End home they'd been dreaming of.

While Commack was a rather white community--redlining still having been a
factor when we'd moved to that house in the early 60s--it was a relatively
innocent place in the sense that we'd all arrived there at the same time.
Everyone was a "new kid" or had been one recently enough that I never felt or
heard kids picking on a kid for being a newer-comer.

I learned over that first summer of living in the Hamptons that there was a
side that I'd never seen on those couple of long summer vacations we'd taken
out there when we were little kids. There was a year-round population that
had been living there since the 1640s, and they were a far different breed
than the tourists who filled the villages to the brim in the summertime.
These were people who stayed generation after generation, and who had
contempt for the tourists and their money, as well as newcomers who had the
audacity not to clear out at the end of the summer.

Those ten years between Commack and California never saw me once feeling, as
Claire says it, "like a native (meaning born and raised here, as opposed to
meaning 'savage')." I might have developed friendships among the activist
subculture and partied with a group of sensitive young musicians, but the
year I left for the West Coast, I could still feel those "native" guys in
their pickups driving by and shaking their heads at me.

"While I'm dissecting the fog, I'm searching what I know of his entire life
for the answers to what happened, not just those last few minutes. Why did
he really come to Hackett? Why was I drawn to him, and nobody else was?
What was Lani Garver? Was he one of those super-kind gay boys that certain
girls love to bare their souls to? Is his body caught under some sunken boat
wreck that will prevent it from ever being found? Or did he escape? Are
there other Claires out there, and is he busy making another basket case into
a rational, useful member of the human race? Was Lani Garver an angel? If I
knew the answers to who Lani was and what he was, I would have more peace
accepting where he was."

So asks Claire, who tells us the story of WHAT HAPPENED TO LANI GARVER. It
is a horror story about a person--well, let's say, a being--who arrives with
his mother on Hackett Island, where Claire is a native. Sporting an unusual
hairstyle and graced with delicate features, it is unclear whether LANI
(pronounced "Lonny") is a boy or a girl. This sure ain't no native! And so,
the next generation of the good 'ol boys get set to make this strange
newcomer "welcome."

Claire is a native. Her boyfriend is a member of the fish frat--"that's the
sons of Hackett's commercial fishermen, who are sometimes lifeguards and
usually very hunky." Her friends think she should be happy, set in her
position among the high school elite, healthy after missing most of junior
high due to treatments for acute juvenile leukemia.

But Claire, who still has her share of problems, sees the neatly folded boxes
of her life crumble when she becomes friends with Lani. And what happens as
a result is a tense tale that won't let you go.

"We don't talk about the drowning around the island. We don't really talk
about what led up to it, either. If I hear Lani's name, it's usually in
mentions of him having gone to our high school for only two days, and isn't
that weird, as if the greater mysteries never existed. Maybe that's the way
people need to remember it."

While reading WHAT HAPPENED TO LANI GARVER, my stomach all knotted up, I kept
asking myself, "Could a whole group of kids really be this horrible?" But as
I consider the outrageous hate crimes we've seen publicized in recent years,
think back to what was still happening to African-Americans during my
childhood, and think about what it felt like to be among the East End
natives, I see that it's all too real.

Richie Partington
http://richiespicks.com
BudNotBuddy at aol.com ( )

Good book. A little confusing and hard to follow at first, but great plot. ( )

No one on Hackett Island is quite sure if Lani is a "he" or a "she" ; and this makes Claire's friends very nervous. But not Claire, something about Lani makes her look closer - at herself and her friends. When a violent incident changes everything Claire must ask herself - who was Lani Garver? ( )