Me Being Me Is Exactly as Insane as You Being You
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- $0.99
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- $0.99
Publisher Description
A heartfelt, humorous story of a teen boy’s impulsive road trip after the shock of his lifetime—told entirely in lists!
Darren hasn’t had an easy year.
There was his parents’ divorce, which just so happened to come at the same time his older brother Nate left for college and his longtime best friend moved away. And of course there’s the whole not having a girlfriend thing.
Then one Thursday morning Darren’s dad shows up at his house at 6 a.m. with a glazed chocolate doughnut and a revelation that turns Darren’s world inside out. In full freakout mode, Darren, in a totally un-Darren move, ditches school to go visit Nate. Barely twenty-four hours at Nate’s school makes everything much better or much worse—Darren has no idea. It might somehow be both. All he knows for sure is that in addition to trying to figure out why none of his family members are who they used to be, he’s now obsessed with a strangely amazing girl who showed up out of nowhere but then totally disappeared.
Told entirely in lists, Todd Hasak-Lowy’s debut YA novel perfectly captures why having anything to do with anyone, including yourself, is:
1. painful
2. unavoidable
3. ridiculously complicated
4. possibly, hopefully the right thing after all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Darren's father shows up before school one morning and informs Darren that he's gay. This sends 15-year-old Darren into a tailspin of wondering about his parents' former marriage, and what this means for him and his older brother, Nate. With Nate's approval, Darren leaves school to visit his brother at the University of Michigan much to his parents' chagrin. When Zooey, an intense girl from school, unexpectedly tags along with him, Darren fumbles his way into a romance and is reassured about his own sexuality (since his father's confession, he has wondered if he's gay, too). Hasak-Lowy (33 Minutes) presents Darren's ruminations and experiences entirely via a series of numbered lists written in a deadpan third-person voice (a hookup scene is entitled "6 Things They Do," with entries that include Kiss, Breathe, Finish, and Pass Out). As Darren struggles to gain some form of control over events in his life and negotiate his preconceptions about homosexuality, Hasak-Lowy maintains a sweet, acerbically funny, and often painfully honest tone. Ages 14 up.