Remedied Volume 1: Barriers to Their Truths

This debut coming of age novel follows the story of a gay teenager in Nevada, curious to a fault and coming to terms with the way mental illness affects his life. Oliver Quinn doesn’t want a tutor— after having grown up scared of everything, along with all the bullying at school, he doesn’t want to deal with yet another person being handed a reason to judge him. But his tutor turns out to be Alexander Rayes, a boy he’s had a crush on since his freshman year. So he figures that it can’t be all that bad, and that maybe it’s actually a virtue. Throughout the course of his junior year, Oliver experiences a lot of firsts. More specifically, he experiences falling in love with someone who might be a little more complicated than he’d initially thought. And with the responsibility of falling in love comes the responsibility of growing up, something Oliver isn’t quite sure he’s ready for. As Alex grieves the loss of his father and Oliver tries to understand what he doesn’t know in such a way that makes it almost detrimental to his health, the two find comfort and understanding in each other. With the hope of helping his boyfriend with something he doesn’t want to admit to, Alex slowly reveals his past, though barely sating Oliver’s need to know everything out of his fear of the unknown. Through these revelations, Oliver learns that you can’t save somebody, you can only love them, but nevertheless, he tries. Realistic and relatable, Remedied is based on the struggle of being a mentally ill, gay teenager in high school. Similar to other LGBTQ novels such as Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli and History Is All You Left Me by Adam Silvera, Remedied highlights the hardships of growing up, changing, and coming to terms with who you are.