This is Kind of An Epic Love Story, Kacen Callender
This book is very much YA, which I expected, so it was a nice choice when I didn’t feel like I had much focus, and it proved to be a really quick read. What drew me to it was that the love interest, Ollie, is deaf and uses sign language, and I read from reviews that the narrative explains the signs a couple of times and then expects you to remember them. I’m not super visual, so I thought that might be tricky, but I definitely wanted to see how it worked out.
The main character and narrator, Nate, isn’t deaf, but he learned some sign from Ollie when they were younger. Ollie moved away — and left their friendship rather broken-off, as it ended with Nate trying to kiss Ollie and Ollie running the heck away — but now he’s back, just as Nate’s broken up with his best friend, Flo. Ollie’s still trying to make a long-distance relationship work, but Nate can’t help but hope they can pick things back up again…
The sign language thing was really well done; even if you’re not great at actually picking up and remembering the signs, the context does tell you what’s happening, without repeatedly translating the same signs over and over. It also avoids translating directly from sign to English, though it supplements the signs it describes by the boys typing messages to each other via their phones.
The teenage web of friendships are all pretty well done, too; I could totally believe in Flo and Nate’s awkwardness with each other, and their slow feeling out of the new boundaries, and I believed in their little group of friends. It’s mostly sort of sketched in, but the sketch works.
I found Nate’s repeated fatalism rather grating, in some ways — every time something doesn’t go his way in some tiny way, he just gives up on it… but that’s kind of the point of the story, so you have to bear with it a bit. I thought Flo and Nate’s friendship was sweet, for all its ups and downs; Ollie’s probably too good for Nate, but maybe Nate’s starting to learn, at the end…
I found myself kinda wrong-footed by the total lack of homophobia anywhere in the book. I don’t know how representative of a teen experience it is now, but my teens were completely swallowed by the homophobia of other kids and people around me. Sure, that’s 12 years ago, and in a conservative sort of school which only let girls start to attend a couple of years before I joined the school… But it felt very weird to read a book where homophobia was just not a problem. I know why some authors prefer to do it — and I’d like to think maybe it is people’s experience now — but it was really pretty odd to be reading a certain sort of YA, expecting it at every turn of the page, and just… not finding it. Not a bad weird! Just weird.
