One school. Twenty voices.

Endless possibilities.

There's the girl who is in love with Holden Caulfield. The boy who wants to be strong who falls for the girl who's convinced she needs to be weak. The girl who writes love songs for a girl she can't have. The two boys teetering on the brink of their first anniversary. And everyone in between.

As he did in the highly acclaimed Boy Meets Boy, David Levithan gives us a world of unforgettable voices that readers will want to visit again and again. It's the realm of possibility open to us all - where love, joy, and the stories we tell will linger.

Thoughts: One of the reasons I have many 3 and 4 star reviews on Dead Book Darling has nothing to do with all books being awesome. The opposite, in fact; about 40% of books I pick up I dislike intensely. Normally I don’t end up sticking around to see them end because I have better things to waste my time on.

Then a book like The Realm of Possibility comes along. A book that makes you want to pull out your hair and puck out your eyes in despair – but, hey, it’s short. You might as well finish the torture and then delete the memory from your brain.

In case I haven’t given the game away: I did not like this book.

David Levithan is trying too damn hard to be “one of the kids” while still preaching morality. Now, that would be fine if he could pull it off. His Boy Meets Boy does exactly the same thing, only the writing is good and the characters are well developed. The Realm of Possibility just isn’t well written.

The poetry is just… bad. The song “lyrics” are bad. The prose would have been… fine, if it hadn’t been for the obsession with formatting. All 800 of the characters might have been rather interesting, except they get about 3 pages a piece. It’s like Levithan followed an online how-to-write-in-verse and didn’t realise that his novel-writing skills would not translate. Give the man one of those gold stars saying “you tried, but please never try again”.

Just because you want to be progressive and write about LGBT characters does not automatically make your writing good. Just because you want to be inclusive and write about eating disorders does not make everything that comes out of pen gold. Nothing about this book felt genuine, While I applaud David Levithan for his good intentions, his execution just… sucked.

Bottom line? The Realm of Possibility has a vomit-inducing pretentiousness about it. Good intentions do not a good book make.

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Kay

Your ghost host at Dead Book Darling

Kay's been blogging about urban fantasy, young adult and werewolves since 2009. She's a firm believer in the many uses of the towel, the science of deduction and other fandom in-jokes. To support her book-buying habit, Kay keeps up a day-job as a science journalist (so feel free to ask her about Physics).

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