Book Review: Will Grayson, Will Grayson

From Goodreads: Will Grayson meets Will Grayson. One cold night, in a most unlikely corner of Chicago, two strangers are about to cross paths. From that moment on, their world will collide and Iives intertwine.
It's not that far from Evanston to Naperville, but Chicago suburbanites Will Grayson and Will Grayson might as well live on different planets. When fate delivers them both to the same surprising crossroads, the Will Graysons find their lives overlapping and hurtling in new and unexpected directions. With a push from friends new and old - including the massive, and massively fabulous, Tiny Cooper, offensive lineman and musical theater auteur extraordinaire - Will and Will begin building toward respective romantic turns-of-heart and the epic production of history's most awesome high school musical.

Thoughts: I did hear about this book way back in 2010 when it came out, although I heard more about David Levithan at that stage than John Green. I even read one of Levithan's books - Love is the Higher Law and really enjoyed it.

For me, the idea of two authors writing a book together is a thing of intrigue. I imagine it's a bit like team teaching with someone - it either works really well or is a total disaster! This and Good Omens and two that work very well. Pratchett and Gaiman said that they wrote Good Omens with a lot of emails and phone calls. I would love to see those emails, I think they would be hilarious. Similarly I think Green and Levithan's conversations about this book would be incredibly interesting.

For two writers who have fairly different writing styles, they choose a fairly safe path. Writing alternative chapters, each author writing the POV of one of the Will Grayson's. And for anyone who has read either of these authors, it wasn't hard to pick who was who.

Green's Will was, as many of Green's main characters are, intelligent, nerdy, but part of a really solid friendship with a few other slightly out of the box kids on the edge. They don't fit in, but they don't really want to so that is ok.  Levithan's Will is much darker - suffering from depression and self imposed isolation, the one friend he seems to have is basically a conniving bitch. Both have aspects that I think teens would identify with. Eventually their paths cross and they end up sharing a friendship with the hugely flamboyant and ridiculous Tiny. The book provides some truly hilarious moments,  ones where I found myself laughing out loud. It also has moments where your heart aches for Will Grayson (Both of them.)

I found Levithan's Will slightly harder to read for a couple of reasons. Obviously as a way to distinguish between the two Wills, Levithan's chapters are written completely in lower case. no capital letters at all, for anything. lower case i's, lower case names, everything. i hate it. if you are going to need to distinguish your text, do something like use italics, or a different font. Don't go abusing grammar! I read a review where someone said Levithan did it because his Will "is a lowercase person. His whole self image is what he projects in that space, and his one comfortable form of communication is when he's anonymous and sending instant messages." I'm sorry, I'm not buying it. I think Levithan managed to portray that about Will without making it difficult for an old fuddy duddy like me to read.  Which brings me to the second reason I think I found Levithan's Will hard to read - he was so raw. Will was suffering from depression - proper, true, there is nothing good about me,  I can't get out of bed without medication depression. And Levithan writes it so well. 

Will Grayson, Will Grayson is worth the read. In a market that is becoming increasingly saturated with substandard pulp fiction , Levithan and Green are making YA credible. 

Will Grayson, Will Grayson gets 4 stars!

 *        Did not like it
**       It was OK
***      Liked it
****    Really liked it
*****   It was amazing

Love is the Higher Law

Love is the Higher Law by David Levithan

I know I read a review of this somewhere, but I'm not sure where! So whoever it was, can I just say thank you!

Love is the Higher Law is set on the day of and the days just after September 11.  It focuses on 3 New York teens who are loosely connected and their reactions to the attacks. While none of them lose anyone in the attacks, they are still strongly affected.

It's not a long book , just over 160 pages and only took me 2-3 hours to read, but it packs a punch. I can remember waking up and watching the news in disbelief. I was just pregnant with my first child and I wondered what kind of world I was bring them into. At work, the normal classroom routine was blown out of the water as we tried the best we could to explain to the kids what had happened and why. A friend who is American by birth was trying to describe exactly how tall the twin towers were, again, something we struggled to comprehend. Even now, when someone says 9/11 you automatically think of that day. If it has had that kind of effect on me, I can't imagine what it would be like for someone who calls New York home.

The opening chapter of the book really got me thinking. Clare is at school and her brother at the elementary school across the road. She goes to his classroom and ends up staying and helping his teacher. Parents arrive to collect their children and eventually there is a handful of kids left. It occurred to me how difficult it would have been to be a teacher in one of the schools near Ground Zero. Where are these kids parents? Are they simply having trouble getting through or is it something much worse? As a teacher you would most probably have a general idea of what the parents did. Did they work in the Twin Towers, or near by? Suddenly you are in charge of a group of children and you don't know if their parents are coming for them or not. It would have been horrendous!

In all for me, this book gave me an insight into how 9/11 would have affected some people. How the whole of New York had to find a new way of being, a way of keeping going, of continuing to live in the face of so much death,.

I think about the posters, how they went in a matter of days from poster of the missing to posters of the missed. Eventually they were taken down. Gone is not forgotten, but our lives cannot be a memorial. This city  cannot be a memorial. This city has to be a city. Our lives have to be our lives.