Fiction by Author: T-Z

Australian humorist Taylor turns to serious subject matter in this emotionally charged story of love between two teenage boys. His accurate, nuanced writing shows rather than tells of the awkward advances and skittish retreats of 15-year-old David Mason as he struggles to understand his attraction to slightly older Theo Meyer. David feels like he is entering a foreign place when he visits the more outspoken Theo and his Polish grandmother (who insists David call her "Gretel"), yet the way David feels when he is with Theo seems even more alien to him. Being a rugby star at school ceases to be important, and David quits the team. He spends his time with Theo helping to landscape his grandmother's yard. The relationship between the two boys is cut short before it can fully develop physically (Gretel sends Theo back to live with his mother). Although David is devastated, it is clear that he will survive and continue to grow into an individual as unique and remarkable as the "blue lawn" surrounding Gretel's home.

Everything about Stefan's love affair with Willi is damned.  They are both men.  Willi is an Austrian airman, a Nazi soldier.  Stefan's brother is actively fighting the Germans in the Polish Resistance.  Yet Stefan and Willi's love sees no boundaries of nation, race, or gender.  It is too strong to deny.  And too passionate to survive.  When the Gestapo discovers their affair, not only their love but their lives are in great danger.

Based on the true story of Stefan K., who has written a letter to readers at the end of book, Damned Strong Love is a novel that shows the power and importance of love even as it describes the terrible price of intolerance and hatred.  Stefan and Willi's love was damned, but it was strong; Lutz van Dijk's powerful and humane novel is their legacy.

Harlan Brown is a tough, conservative track coach—hiding from his past at a small college.

Billy Sive is a brilliant young runner who is homosexual—and doesn’t mind who knows it.

When they fall in love, they will enter a race against hate and prejudice that takes them to the ’76 Olympics and a shocking, shattering conclusion.

Full of action and dramatic tension, this story set in Canada reveals the problems of a high school hockey player during his first year on a Triple A team. A. J. Brandiosa's elation in making the Cyclones is undercut by the fear he will not measure up to the other players. The 17-year-old's hot temper and aggressiveness in the game soon bring him the wrong kind of notoriety. Trying to dispel his reputation for being a "bad boy" on the ice is not the only challenge A. J. faces. Even more difficult is his struggle to accept that his best friend and teammate, Tully Brown, is gay. After A. J.'s initial shock over this news wears off, the boy begins to question his own sexuality.

Erin arrives at Oshawa Secondary one morning to learn that her best friend and fellow art student, Marcel, has been severely beaten and is in a coma. Everyone assumes that he is a victim of gay bashing, but when school officials and the police seem to put the crime on the back burner, Erin makes a promise to Marcel's mother to find out who committed it. Her friend Amy and Amy's religious fundamentalist boyfriend try to discourage her from the investigation as does Jon, her dope-smoking, prejudiced boyfriend, but the teen is determined to find out who attacked her friend.

Betty S. Evans, Southwest Missouri State University, Springfield

While at first their friendship is based on zines, dysfunctional families, and dreams of escape, soon both John and Marisol begin to shed their protective shells. Unfortunately, John mistakes this growing intimacy for love, and a disastrous date to his junior prom leaves that friendship in ruins. Desperately hoping to fix things, John convinces Marisol to come with him to a zine conference on Cape Cod. On the sandy beaches by the Bluefish Wharf Inn, John realizes just how hard love can be.

With keen insight into teenage life, Ellen Wittlinger delivers a story of adolescence that is fierce and funny -- and ultimately transforming -- even as it explores the pain of growing up.

His dead father is fading into a snapshot memory.  His mother, the famous psycho-poet, has relocated them from Chicago to a rural New England town that looks like an advertisement for small-town America==a bad advertisement.  he can't seem to start a sentence without using the "f" word.  And now, the very  house he lives in is coming apart at the seams--literally--torn down bit by bit as he and his mother renovate the old Victorian.  but deep within the walls lie secrets from a previous life--mason jars stuffed with bits of clothing, scraps of writing, old photographs--disturbing clues to the mysterious existence of a woman who disappeared decades before.  While his mother grows more obsessed and unsettled by the discovery of these homemade reliquaries, Noah fights his own troubling obsession with the boy next door, the enigmatic J.D.  It is J.D. who begins to quietly anchor Noah to his new life.  J.D., who is hiding terrible, haunting pain behind an easy smile and a carefree attitude.

Soon, the boys' tentative attraction to each other blossoms into a very real love, one that will shatter the manicured façade of small-town civility and reveal the cruelties and betrayals hiding carefully behind the emotional walls constructed by husbands and wives, mothers and sons, friends and neighbors.  And as Noah makes one last startling discovery within the old house, he will come face-to-face with a secret bigger than any heart should have to hold, and a truth more healing than he ever could have hoped for.

Par Portnoy, part Holden Caufield, never less than truthful, and always fully human, Noah York is a touching and unforgettable character.  His story is one of hope and heartbreak, love and redemption, of holding on to old wounds when new skin is what's needed, and of the power of growing up whole once every secret has been set free.