Upsetting 10

Surprisingly good ... I admit I was not very packed a priori. The topic of homosexuality and homophobia, catchy title, the hype around the book and physical young first author had somehow aroused my apprehensions. But nay ...

This is an engaging novel, sincere, written with the guts and grips your stomach, touched me because I have found a part of my story, the story - actually quite common - for bullied children because they are blacks, too big, too small or just a bit different from others.

The first scene is very well made: from the same region, I have found quite the heavy atmosphere of the little populated cities often miserable workers and farmers expelled from their farm, run by a small clique of right-thinking citizens.

The author first describes the humiliations that other children inflict him because of his difference. He speaks of his shame of taking the blows without daring to make them, of his loneliness in a family that does not include the normality and his desire, up to come to try to get into the mold costs. By forcing appearances, deceiving those around him, denying his inclinations. And we tremble for this child desperate to be adopted by his peers at the risk of getting lost.

Then came a cry, a gasp, a saving breath of fresh air, the flight to the city. Far from home, far from the judgments arrested him away from the weight of the eyes of others. It is a real birth to the world, the revelation of what he carries deep within him and that he has always known. Great lesson in courage and maturity. Which gives hope to all those who are or have been bullied, crushed, destroyed by the dictates of right-thinking, of normality, of common sense.