I believe I have read all of his books now. I will start by saying that of them all (What If It's Us (joint with Becky Albertalli), History Is All You Left Me, & They Both Die at the End) this wasn't my favorite but I felt like it was important. I will also say that as he writes he gets better and better. This is is debut novel.
Is being Gay or Straight who you are or a choice you make? I believe it is not a choice but is part of who a person is born to be.
And if you could be happy by forgetting, by having memories altered so you are not who you were but who you think you need to be to be happy, if a procedure to do this existed would you? Would you want to completely forget the person who broke your heart or wronged you or a wrong you did?
Add these two questions together and you are in the version of The Bronx that Adam sets his story in. Aaron meets Thomas and starts to feel....but what is it and how is it possible, after all Aaron has a girlfriend he loves and has started to have sex with. So who is he? What makes him him? And when the pain of figuring it out and all that it brings him becomes too much he considers getting this procedure from the fictional Leteo group. It manipulates memory and makes it so people don't remember things.
And then the world really unravels. Are things what they seem? If you are who you are no matter what you remember or force yourself to forget then wouldn't these parts of you just surface again eventually?
And how much happy is enough? More Happy Than Not?
(Finished November 5, 2018)
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