REVIEWS Book Marks Richard Labonte | September 22,2004 Fruit, by Brian Francis. MacAdam/Cage, 284 pages, $23 hardcover. Outwardly, young Peter Paddington seems relatively normal. He loves his ditzy, dysfunctional parents, grins and bears the selfish cruelty of his two older sisters, dutifully ensures that the newspapers he delivers land on his customers' front porches, and navigates the perils of junior-high cliques with aplomb. And – like every good stereotypical sissy – his best friends are straight girls, he occasionally dons dresses, and he's nuts about musicals. Inwardly, however, Peter is a jangled mess, medicating his emotions with chocolate bars and seeking security in assorted religions. Fruit, a sweet and tart novel, is about a somewhat tubby queer kid whose newly popped nipples keep teasing him (or so he imagines). He obviously has issues around body image – and when Scotch tape won't keep those nips from poking out and betraying his burgeoning sexuality, he resorts to masking tape. Ouch. This charming debut captures the perils of male puberty – out-of-control hormones, pits and pubes that sprout hair overnight, and an inexhaustible supply of boners – with humanity and hilarity. Once Upon a Dyke: New Exploits of Fairy Tale Lesbians, edited by Karin Kallmaker and Julia Watts. Bella Books, 310 pages, $14.95 paper. Only two of the four novella-length stories in this accomplished collection have much to do with fairy tales. Therese Szymanski has the most fun with her gleeful parody: "A Butch in Fairy Tale Land" skews half a dozen classic characters, from Little Red Riding Hood to Rapunzel to Sleeping Beauty, as a buff butch heroine makes her dizzy, erotic way through assorted tarted-up bedtime stories of our youth. Barbara Johnson borrows her plot unabashedly: "Charlotte of Hessen" is essentially the story of Cinderella and the slipper that fits, told with kinky queer twists – the prince is gay, has a lesbian sister, and really wants to wed the coachman. The other two tales are equally engaging, but not very fairy: "La Belle Rose," by co-editor Watts, is a lovely story about running away to join the circus and falling in love with the bearded lady, and "A Fish Out of Water," by co-editor Kallmaker, is an alternate-future fantasy about mermaids and land maidens lusting for each other - shades, perhaps, of The Little Mermaid. Written in Water: The Prose Poems, by Luis Cernuda. City Lights, 158 pages, $15.95 paper. Though he was Federico Garcia Lorca's homosexual contemporary, Spanish poet Cernuda hasn't been honored – or romanticized – nearly as much. Lorca died young, assassinated by the fascists of Spain's civil war, while Cernuda went into lifelong exile in Europe and North America, dying in Mexico in 1963. Written in Water goes a long way toward relieving the restless poet's undeserved obscurity. His writing – lyrical, autobiographical, sensual, philosophical, and always guarded – traces his Seville boyhood, his passion for peace, his sad longing for a sense of place, and his radical (for its time) embrace of his sexuality. Few of the pieces are more than a page or two long; many ache with contradictions of an aristocratic intellectual fated to be a rootless wanderer. This slim book, translated with delicate assurance by Stephen Keller, combines two different Spanish collections (Ocnos and Variaciones sobre tema mexicano) that the author had hoped to reissue as a single volume before his death. These evocative illuminations of an intensely internal life are worth the four-decade wait. 50 Reasons to Say "Goodbye",by Nick Alexander. www.lulu.com, 151 pages, $11.90 paper. For a book brimming with vignettes about lust leading absolutely nowhere and sex gone sadly awry, 50 Reasons to Say "Goodbye" is great fun to read. Hapless Mark, bouncing around England and the rest of Europe, risks blind dates, fritters away his nights in dark bars and stylish clubs, trolls the Internet until dawn, and bikes and hikes with men whose athleticism makes him feel inadequate. As he flees one man, he is ever hopeful that the next will be the perfect partner, the dream lover, the ideal man. Time and again, perfection is an illusion, dreams melt into nightmares, and ideals are dashed - experiences recounted in self-contained chapters with lachrymose titles like "The Universe Lets Us Down" and "Drunk and Lonely." Alexander's self-published fiction is too intelligent to be written off as "gay chick-lit" – but it sure does share that genre's sassy way of hyperbolizing autobiography to tell an entertaining story. This obstinately optimistic first novel expresses both passion and pathos with firsthand freshness and a delightful balance of whimsy and wisdom. Featured Excerpt: Those creatures whose beauty we admired one time, where are they now? Fallen, tarnished, defeated, if not dead. But the eternal miracle of youth continues, and at the sight of some new young body, sometimes a certain resemblance awakens an echo, a trace of the other we loved before. Only when we remember that between one and the other there's a distance of twenty years, that this one hadn't even been born when the first still carried the bright inextinguishable flame the generations pass from hand to hand, an impotent pain assaults us, comprehending, behind the persistence of beauty, the mutability of bodies. – from Written in Water, by Luis Cernuda Footnotes: A BOOK TO WATCH OUT FOR: Scholastic Press editor David Levithan and young poet Billy Merrell are looking for writers ages 13 to 23, queer or not, for an anthology of personal nonfiction about today's queer teen experience. All royalties from the book, coming from Knopf in fall 2005, will go to GLSEN (the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network), a national organization ensuring safe schools for all LBGT students. "It used to be that queer teens were fighting to find a single voice. Now we each have our own voices - and finally someone wants to give us a place to tell our stories in order to show what gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender/questioning life is really like now," say Levithan and Merrell in their call for submissions. The co-editors bring their own experience to Queerthology. Merrell – who will be 23 when the book comes out – is the author of Talking in the Dark, a collection of personal narrative poems that tell the story of a boy coming of age in contemporary America. Levithan's young adult novel, Boy Meets Boy, won the 2003 Lambda Literary Award in the Children's/YA category; his second novel, The Realm of Possibility, is a tale told by 20 different teens who go to the same high school - "straight and queer, goth and gospel, hopeful and heartbroken." The deadline for submissions to Queerthology is Oct. 15; for information, go to www.queerthology.com. Richard Labonte has been reading, editing, selling, and writing about queer literature since the mid-'70s. Previous edition Book Marks [05/07/2004]