The Year of Ice

At the start of the book it's January 1978, and for Kevin, the protagonist, it marks two things: his 18th birthday, and the second anniversary of his mother's death. He is living with his father who works a lot, doesn't talk much and is chased by widows, goes to school, packs bags in a supermarket, hangs out with friends, has a crush on one of the other guys in the team. Over the course of the winter and spring, Kevin finds out more about what was going on at the time of his mother's death, and it changes his relationship with his father. It's a year of realising that other people aren't necessarily what you thought they were like, and can surprise you, in good ways as well as bad.

The book offers a distinct viewpoint on sexuality. I like that Kevin's sexuality is just one of the many problems he has to deal with, along with the death of his mother and his father's cheating. The setting is important because Malloy uses the "bitterly cold Midwest winter" as a backdrop for the emotional distance between the characters.

I was worried when I started reading that this book would make me cry (I seem to run into a lot of those books) and in some ways it did. But mostly it was pretty damn amazing. The Year of Ice is a coming of age story while also being a coming out story (sort of). But it's also about love and family. The novel took a few twists I wasn't expecting, all of them adding, rather than detracting, too the book. Kevin was a strong main character and I liked his brashness mixed with his fears associated with being gay.

The main character of this coming of age / coming out novel is often unlikeable. But as the story unfolds, it becomes apparent that he is not the only adolescent in his truncated family. Absorbing and well-written, irritating and amusing, this book portrays the angst, longing, and confusion of a gay Midwestern teen trying to figure out his place in the world. Recommended.

Brian Malloy's book "The Year of Ice" seems just another typical high school coming-out novel. Fun to read in the train or on the beach, perhaps, but not really worthwhile from any more critical point of view. However, this appearance is deceptive. Though the tone is generally quite superficial, owing to the apparently not too bright teenage protagonists' point of view, the plot is certainly not and leaves the reader excited to the end.

The general idea of the book is quite simple: the protagonist, Kevin Doyle, lives with his shifty lower class father after his mother died in a mysterious and sudden car accident. His relationship with his dad deteriorates as the latter gets into troublesome relationships and even more into the bottle. show more What makes it all worse for our Kevin is that while he is struggling to avoid the consequences and meaning of his homosexuality, it becomes increasingly clear that his dad is hiding something from him, something relating to his mother. The development of the plot is basically the interaction between these two issues on Kevin's mind, mediated by the intervention of a host of secondary characters.

There are some downsides, nevertheless. Many of the other characters in the book, in particular Kevin's good friends, only develop in the plot in their relation to Kevin but seem to have no real rounded character or development of their own. Also, Malloy has a tendency to introduce side-plots that then suddenly end again, leaving the reader wondering what the point of this was. While this makes sense in the context of a person's diary-like description of his experiences in a given time period, it's still not very strong from a plot point of view. Finally, something that struck me as a Dutchman, Malloy has for some reason seen fit to introduce some Dutch into the book and subsequently misspells and misuses almost every single Dutch word. It is not clear whether this is intentional or not, but it is certainly annoying, especially since the translations he gives are often wrong too. It's of minor importance for the book but Malloy would have done better to leave it out.

Overall, the book is surprisingly fun to read and the writing is cynical, funny and to the point. It's delightfully free of the vapidness that is so often particular to gay novels, especially about teenagers. Of course there's plenty of superficiality left, but let's be honest: that's what teenagers are usually like, gay or otherwise. show less

Another gay coming of age novel that is refreshingly well written with a clever story line.

A young man comes to terms with his mother's death, his dysfunctional family, and his own sexuality. Set in the 1970's the book was touching, quirky and a nice read.