Sugarless

An excellent gay coming of age story set in 70s Chicago.
The story is similar to Running with scissors, but the voice is clear and original.
It follows the high schooler Rick Lahrem through the half year he is a member of the speech team of his high school. The same period where he has his sexual debut, his father gets married and his mother finds religion. The story is told in the first person, and is expanded with flashbacks to provide some background as well as occasionally interrupted by comments by a 30 years older self. The flashbacks and anecdotes are seamlessly merged with the main story, while the comments provide a bit of distance in emotional scenes without interrupting the flow of the story.
I could wish the the gay stereotypes show more like the distant father and too close mother relationship were absent, but they are integral to the story, and the book isn't using them apologetically.
The story of a isolated teenager whose rebel anthems are found in musicals instead of the more conventional punk rock is quirky, and presents a new take on the campy gay musical cliche.
The descriptions of period midamerican middleclass are entertaining and believable in their teenage exagerations, and for a non-american the descriptions of american high school are fascinating in an anthropological sense.
The religion critique that is running through the book is humorous, and the peer interaction fresh and original.
If you are familiar with the mercenary religious practices of the US, the very end may seem less anticlimactic, and more profound. At least it took me a bit of reflexion to work it out to my satisfaction. show less

I started and finished Sugarless in one day. I couldn't put it down. At first I was surprised by the level of sexual content (you never know what to expect in Early Review books), but the book absolutely grew on me after I got over my initial "I am on the train and I really hope a fellow passenger doesn't look over my shoulder and see this" reaction. The story is a great story about coming of age, a story about all the unavoidable things that make adolescence such a hard-to-navigate minefield: school, sex, friends, and family. James Magruder has a great writing style and pretty accurately depicts the lives and inner thoughts of high school sophomores, making these young people no more mature or more innocent than they would have been, show more realistically.

The basic outline of the book is that in 1974 the fifteen-year old main character, Rick Lahrem (rhymes with "harem"), is having trouble dealing with his parents' divorce and especially with his mother's remarriage to a man he hates, giving him a stepsister and a new half sister in the process. Just as he and his teachers discover that he has a particular talent for acting/speech making, Rick is also beginning to find that his newly maturing sexuality is more intently focused on men than on women.

There was only one aspect of the book that I did not like. The book is a story told by Rick from some time off in the future from the events of the book, but this is not clear from the beginning. Most of the book is told as if it is happening to the character while it is described, but occasionally and unexpectedly a "looking back" kind of sentence is inserted indicating that Rick is reminiscing about these events some years in the future. By the end of the book this is clear, but when it happens the first few times within the tale it can be jarring; it drops you out of the smoothly flowing story. show less

James Magruder's Sugarless is my favorite book of 2009. In the book, Rick--the narrator--looks back on a formative period in his life with astonishing insight and nostalgia, feeling again, through the telling of them, all of the thrills and anguish of becoming an adult. It offers the reader the vicarious pleasure of watching Rick negotiate his initiation into the sexual world, and then complicates that pleasure with honest depictions of the failure, loss, and grief which constitute mature self-awareness and social existence.

Along the way, we experience surprisingly clear yet complex descriptions of Rick's self-discovery: puzzling out the tangles of sexual desire, family, and social relationships, and of the ways that people talk around show more and about both the important and trivial things of life. As confusion resolves into certainty, Rick, his world, and the important people in it hurtle with all of the intensity of adolescence to a crisis as unexpected as it seems inevitable. Rick's conflicts and strength and emotional landscape shine through the prose with amazing clarity. The last chapter, in which an older Rick looks back on his life, expresses the losses of youth with a beautifully understated profundity.

I wholeheartedly agree with Tony Kushner's applause: "The texture of Rick's world and the details of his experience ring true and important, with emotional depths that warrant and reward repeated re-readings" (from the back of the book).

I definitely recommend that you take a look at the website for the novel--it has a great trailer (when did books start having trailers, anyway?) and lots of interesting tidbits about the author and his work: http://www.jamesmagruder.com/ show less

A good coming-of-age book about a young gay man and his journey. The author uses high school speech competitions as the backdrop of the story - something new for the genre; it works very well. Juxtaposed with Rick's coming to terms and coming out is his mother's increasing commitment to religion. A subject that Magruder gives a bang-on description of.
All-in-all, after reading this book, one feels that the coming-out experience of gay men doesn't change very much over the years.

In some ways, this should have been a YA novel and in other ways, it's clearly an adult novel. It's the story of a high school boy who is fighting a constant battle to figure out who he is. Magruder's style is engrossing, as is the tale he tells. Rick joins the speech team (after reading my favorite short story of all time, The Scarlet Ibis) and ends up falling in love. Along the way, he learns about being gay, about sex and about his family. Sugarless is far more intense than the title and cover lead you to believe and perhaps that's the point. A very good coming of age story.

I received this as an Early Reviewer book, but it took me a while to figure out what troubled me about this book. Normally it's right up my alley: a young gay male coming of age book - but the tone and the content were so discordant I kept feeling something was wrong - it was too flip for what was happening. He's bullied by his schoolmates and his sister and harangued by his newly-Christian mother, and is meanwhile seduced by a judge in the intra-school debating contest. All of that comes to a head in the end, but the character just doesn't seem to deal with all of it.

This is the "coming-of-age" story of high schooler Rick Lahrem. The book lacks a clear purpose, the plot is sketchy, and characterization is shallow. It's strongest in its portrayal of Rick's passion for speech (dramatic interpretation) but falls short in building believable relationships between characters. In particular, the treatment of Rick's relationship with an older man, a DI judge and speech coach from another school, feels off. Except for a mention that Rick longs to be loved, Magruder gives readers little idea of what goes through Rick's mind as he gets involved with a man more than double his age, a situation that feels uncomfortable to say the least. Considering all the time spent on describing various character's genitals, show more some characterization and glimpse into Rick's thought processes would be nice. Much of the humor relies on mocking characters who lives as one-sided stereotypes, such as the zealous evangelicals and "stoner sluts." I kept waiting for the story to come together, and in the end it did, but it felt forced. Not a book I'll read again. show less