Name: Rio (they/them)'s review of Two Boys Kissing by David Levithan
Item: Two Boys Kissing
Rating: 3.5
Author: Rio (they/them)

David Levithan

A chorus of men who died of AIDS observes and yearns to help a cross-section of today's gay teens who navigate new love, long-term relationships, coming out, self-acceptance, and more in a society that has changed in many ways.

Two Boys Kissing

From the New York Times best-selling author of Every Day, another thoughtful and original perspective on the things we do for love. The two boys kissing are Craig and Harry. Theyr'e hoping to set the world record for the longest kiss. They're not a couple, but they used to be. Peter and Neil are a couple. Their kisses are different. Avery and Ryan have only just met and are trying to figure out what happens next. Cooper is alone. He's not sure how he feels. As the marathon progresses, these boys, their friends and families evaluate the changing nature of feelings, behaviour and this crazy thing called love. Praise for Every Day: ‘Every Day is a wonder.’ Patrick Ness, author of Chaos Walking trilogy and A Monster Calls

Izaac Richards

Neil pauses to look at Peter - to really look at him and ask himself what he wants. He knows he loves Peter, and also knows he's not sure what that means. There is no one else in the world that he wants to kiss or screw or talk to or share his life with. So why. he wonders, does a part of it still feel empty? Why, after a year, isn't it complete? 

He's on the verge of it - we can tell. He is on the verge of finding that very hard truth - that it will never be complete, or feel complete. This is usually something you only have to learn once - that just like there is no such thing as forever, there is no such thing as total. When you're in the thrall of your first love, this discovery feels like the breaking of all momentum, the undermining of all promise. For the past year, Neil has assumed that love was like a liquid pouring into a vessel, and that the longer you loved, the more full the vessel became, until it was entirely full. The truth is that over time, the vessel expands as well. You grow. Your life widens. And you can't expect your partner's love alone to fill you.

 Good first dates are more than short stories. They are first chapters. On a good first date, everything is springtime. 

And when a good first date becomes a good relationship, the springtime lingers. Even after it's over, there can be springtime.

Love is so painful, how could you ever wish it on anybody? And love is so essential, how could you ever stand in its way? 

You will even miss him stealing the sheets. 

Rio (they/them)

An intense and imaginatively structured novel from the bestselling author of Will Grayson, Will Grayson, Every Day and Boy Meets Boy. Seventeen-year-olds Craig and Harry are trying to set a new Guinness World Record for kissing. Around them, Ryan and Avery are falling in love, Neil and Peter are falling out of love, and Cooper might be somewhere, but he is also, dangerously, nowhere. Narrated, Greek-chorus style, by the generation of gay men lost to AIDS, this novel is a thematic companion to David Levithan's groundbreaking Boy Meets Boy, which celebrates its tenth anniversary in 2013. Two Boys Kissing is trademark Levithan: warm, sharp and real. It is also something new and completely extraordinary. David Levithan is an award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of young adult books, including Boy Meets Boy, Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist (with Rachel Cohn) and Will Grayson, Will Grayson (with John Green). He lives in New Jersey and spends his days in New York, editing and publishing other people's books. textpublishing.com.au 'Two Boys Kissing is wise, respectful and honest, and David Levithan writes with integrity and sensitivity about young love without titillation or sensationalism. I wholeheartedly recommend this extraordinary book.' Readings Monthly 'Levithan never descends into the trite or sentimental. His observations are sharp and insightful...The book made me smile, made me cry, it made me sad and angry and at the end gave me an incredible sense of gratefulness and awe for the beautiful fragility of life and love. Would I recommend this book? You bet!' OutInPerth 'Two Boys Kissing is phenomenal. Beautiful. And I highly recommend it. Everything about this novel was authentic and moving.' YA Midnight Reads 'David Levithan's poignant novel follows the stories of gay teens joined through an unconventional protest.' Entertainment Weekly 'Two Boys Kissing reveals [Levithan's] command of an intriguing, complex narrative with an unusual point of view: the first-person plural. This 'we' is the combined voice of men who died during the AIDS pandemic several decades ago. As the boys' stories become more closely entwined and connect in a satisfying finale, the reflections of these 'shadow uncles' lend a quality of retrospection that is rare (and refreshing) in YA literature.' Washington Post 'A landmark achievement from a writer and editor who has helped create, in literature, a haven for queer youth.' Publishers Weekly 'genuine moments of insight and wisdom...Inspiring.' Kirkus Reviews 'a masterpiece' Dennis Abrams, Publishing Perspectives 'Messages about identity, relationships and life in general that are valid for both boys, girls and adults, gay or not. A powerful novel.' Weekend Herald 'What this story does brilliantly is put the reader in the shoes of those young men who are coming to terms with being gay...Levithan is a much-loved author who writes with sensitivity on issues relevant to young adults. This realistic novel about gay boys is both timely and profoundly moving.' Herald Sun 'David Levithan's latest release is timely and important but, most of all, it is astonishingly sophisticated...Levithan has outdone himself.' Courier Mail

Rowan Myers

I'm a member of the LGBTQIA+ community born in the beginning of the 80s. It was a weird time because I was young when AIDS devastated the community, still a baby when people were dying. But I was absorbing all the hate, learning how people could ignore their fellow man in the name of allegedly charitable gods. I came of age when nobody talked about my sexuality openly (I didn't come out until uni) but everyone knew, and that's why I got beat up walking home from a friend's house. At school at lunch. In the bathroom. I went to a university where people protested the gay-straight alliance club. People from nearby towns drove to hold banners and pass out flyers about how me and my friends were going to hell while we were trying to eat lunch, to study for exams. 

But I was also around for when it started to get better. I cried when Holland legalized gay marriage. I wept when my state (kicking its feet, screaming - I lived in TX at the time) HAD to legalize it. When the country as a whole legalized gay marriage.

But I still cry when I see trans sisters shot. When I see the SCOTUS waffling on making it illegal to fire employees for their sexuality and/or gender identity.


So yeah. I'm biased reading this book. Going in, odds are I was going to really like it. But Levithan has a really engaging format (the narrators are a Greek chorus of deceased gay men from the 70s and 80s who are now watching over the characters in the book). It's a well-written book.

And yes, it made me cry.

I really loved the approach of this book to narration and the constant references to the past and how the queer community lived those years. This is a book I’d really recommend if you’re looking for a glimpse of reality on what people in the LGBTQ+ had to go through in the past and the differences with the present time.
There are many, many beautiful sentences in this book and a lot of truth. Give it a read if you have time!

Georgia Carr

Yet another David Levithan book that manages to hit me absolutely everywhere all at once. I swear, his words are a direct line to my heart (and tear ducts). 

Two Boys Kissing is the story of Harry and Craig, Peter and Neil, Avery and Ryan, and Cooper. It's about human emotion, real thoughts and problems faced by people everywhere, every day. 

I absolutely love David's style of writing. I've read eight of his books now and they keep getting better. He uses words to create pages of people who are so real, so very palpable. There are passages that I read which made me turn away because they just made me feel so intensely overwhelmed with emotion. I don't know what it is, but David Levithan makes me cry so much. Maybe it's that he seems to be describing my exact feelings sometimes, maybe it's that he creates real people who make me feel less lonely for a while. I honestly don't know why, but I do know that he will always rank as one of my favorite authors. 

This story is narrated by a chorus of men who have struggled, men who are no longer living. As other people have said, I guess that could detach from the characters and their thoughts, but I never got that. I always felt in touch with each character and the narration sometimes helped with this. 

Avery and Ryan meet at a prom during the early pages. Harry and Craig broke-up before the book's beginning, but they partake in a marathon of kissing to try and beat the world record. Peter and Neil are together and dating. Cooper's not with anybody. There are different threads going on, different people to keep up with, but it never feels hard to do so. The transitions are smooth and the individual story lines aren't clunky or confusing. 

There's really nothing to fault here. I just loved it.

A chorus of men who have died of AIDS observes and yearns to help a cross-section of today's gay teens who navigate new love, long-term relationships, coming out, self-acceptance and more in a society that has changed in many ways. By the author of Boy Meets Boy.

Archer

It was one of the books that was sad because of the queerness, not just sad and queer. That said, it was really good and I learned a lot.

Find this review and more at 
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    “The first sentence of the truth is always the hardest. Each of us had a first sentence, and most of us found the strength to say it out loud to someone who deserved to hear it. What we hoped, and what we found, was that the second sentence of the truth is always easier than the first, and the third sentence is even easier than that. Suddenly you are speaking the truth in paragraphs, in pages. The fear, the nervousness, is still there, but it is joined by a new confidence. All along, you've used the first sentence as a lock. But now you find that it's the key.”
  

Every now and then I read a book that I just know will stick with me forever. When I find one of these special books, I want every person I know – and even ones I don't – to read it. That was definitely the case with Two Boys Kissing. This book was truly something special and I can't recommend it highly enough.

  
    “If you let the world in, you open yourself up to the world. Even if the world doesn't know that you're there.”
  

I read the audiobook version, which I was pleasantly surprised to find was narrated by the author himself. The book itself was powerful, but having the author read his own words made it that much more so. There's something about listening to an author reading their own words and realizing how much of themselves they put into the characters and the story, that made this one even more powerful and special then it would have been with a different narrator. You could hear his passion for the story in each word he spoke. And those words? They were beautiful and honest. The only drawback of reading this one in audiobook format is that there's no way to highlight the beautiful passages... and there were a lot of them. Had I read this in eBook format, I'd have highlighted half the book. I had to go seek out quotes on Goodreads.

  
    “...he hopes that maybe it'll make people a little less scared of two boys kissing than they were before, and a little more welcoming to the idea that all people are, in fact, born equal, no matter who they kiss or screw, no matter what dreams they have or love they give.”
  

Two Boys Kissing is inspired by a true story. Many of them, actually. While it's true the book mostly centers around Harry and Craig's endeavor to break the Guinness World Record for the longest kiss, there are several other characters whose stories are every bit as important to this book. Harry and Craig's bold gesture has a huge impact on these other characters who are attempting to navigate tricky situations on their own.

  
    “Love is so painful, how could you ever wish it on anybody? And love is so essential, how could you ever stand in its way?”
  

This book was gorgeous and thought-provoking. I know it will stick with me for a very, very long time. It moved me to tears, made me appreciate the struggle of my gay friends, and most of all, made me realize that while progress has undeniably been made, there's still so much more left to achieve. I've recently read that some parents are petitioning schools to remove this book from their libraries. Now, I'm not going to get on my soapbox on this, but all I can say is that I hope that while the parents aren't open-minded enough to give this book a shot, that the school officials will take a few hours and read this beautiful, powerful book and realize taking it out of libraries would do more harm than good, by far.

  
    “You can give words, but you can't take them. And when words are given, that is when they are shared. We remember what that was like. Words so real they were almost tangible. There are conversations you remember, for certain. But more than that, there is the sensation of conversation. You will remember that, even when the precise words begin to blur.”
  

I wasn't sure how the Greek Chorus of gay men would work in this book. It took a little bit of time for me to fully embrace it, but it wasn't long before it became one of my favorite things about this book. Their voices were so honest and it was incredibly moving listening to their thoughts on the events taking place in current day, as compared to their struggles. I got entirely wrapped up in each individual character's story, though I don't think any moved me more than Cooper's. His voice – and the rest of the voices – were so authentic and believable. I've listened to friends talk about some of the same struggles and I think that's what made this book so personal to me.

  
    "We know that some of you are still scared. We know that some of you are still silent. Just because it's better now doesn't mean that it's always good.”
  

There's not one thing I would change about this book, except to maybe make it longer. The world needs more books like this, more writers like David Levithan. This was an emotional and hopeful read. We've come a long way, but there's still so much further to come.

  
    “We do not start as dust. We do not end as dust. We make more than dust. That's all we ask of you. Make more than dust.”

Rio (they/them) &
Two Boys Kissing by David Levithan

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Rio (they/them) &
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