A short story of teenage angst and discovery. Ant is at an all-boys secondary school trying to understand himself and the feelings he has for one of his friends.

One thing that makes this book different from every other teen fiction is that the 'bad' language is blacked out. Sometimes a word here and there, and other times an entire paragraph. Different, but disconcerting!!

While the story is set in the here and now, it only makes you wonder even more about the blacked out text. This is an easy and enjoyable read. ( )

It's short. In some ways it's WAY, WAY too short...104 pages, but Patrick Ness has delivered his message beautifully and said almost all that can be said. Some of you know that I volunteer time to the LGBTQ kids in my city and work almost exclusively with the 13–18-year-olds. Once a teacher always a teacher:) In addition, our library buys and furnishes the shelter with books...they aren't all LGBTQ subjects, but some are, and they help our kids relate to the things that they are feeling and are confronted with everyday...most are written by authors that went through some of the same emotions as these young people at their age. This one recently hit our shelves and has been passed around and has already been well read. The jest of the story is that four friends are grappling with their identities. They have an ally in Mr. Bacon, their cool AP history teacher, when he reconfigures the classroom setup, seating Ant and Charlie together with genial football player Josh Smith and the boys’ former friend, Jack Taylor, now a drama kid. The foursome have now been forced to deal with the fact that Jack is obviously gay...knows, and now could be a threat to Ant and Charlie’s "elephant in the room, secret". The boys all know that being gay is still as taboo as it’s ever been among the traditionally masculine boys and others in their school and state. The story has wonderfully done pencil sketches that help illustrate this really beautiful little story. ( )

I thought this book was very clever, especially the use of “censorship” ( )

A neatly done solution to swearing in YA fiction! Blacked out boxes appear - and the characters are also aware of it.... I enjoyed the way it forced you to mentally fill in the blanks where it had been "censored" and I absolutely agreed with the truth and the irony of the main character's statement that "certain words are necessary because this is real life, but you can't actually show em because we're too young to read about the stuff we actually do". I definitely remember that stage of teenage life well.... I bet there will soon be a whole section of AO3 fanfiction filling in those blanks online from the YA readers in explicit detail!

I really appreciated the key concept behind the book of "what is virginity when you're gay?" because it's not something I had ever seen discussed before in print. It's fantastic to have these diverse titles levelling the playing field.

It was hard to fully appreciate the illustrations in the ebook format but they linked well to the text and heightened the emotion and sense of place within the book. ( )