I read the author's book "Darius the Great Is Not Okay" and that was well-written and an interesting look at Persian/Iranian society and mores as seen by a young American whose family is returning from the United States. The book was listed in a gay/lesbian context in a lot of places, and I didn't really get that because the book never seemed to get into that identity or those kinds of issues--maybe only by implication and you had to read a lot into various situations or relationships. Maybe further books in that series got into sexuality and identity.
This book, "Kiss & Tell," looks like its going to get into gay romance in a much more frank and obvious way. The cover makes that pretty clear to me--the book is obviously highly "packaged" and "marketed" that way, and the cover looks like the covers of a lot of similar sorts of YA books being published these days.
I'm not sure that's a great thing. If I were a young person, I don't know that I'd like it if I was aware I was being pandered to by publishers who are these days selling books to different groups in society more as a matter of "product placement" and "marketing segments" than as some sort of ethical, broad offering of different sorts of books, I think.
But I expect this will be a good read, even if it's similar to other current romances and hip-young-people books, since Adib Khorram is such a good writer.
This book, "Kiss & Tell," looks like its going to get into gay romance in a much more frank and obvious way. The cover makes that pretty clear to me--the book is obviously highly "packaged" and "marketed" that way, and the cover looks like the covers of a lot of similar sorts of YA books being published these days.
I'm not sure that's a great thing. If I were a young person, I don't know that I'd like it if I was aware I was being pandered to by publishers who are these days selling books to different groups in society more as a matter of "product placement" and "marketing segments" than as some sort of ethical, broad offering of different sorts of books, I think.
But I expect this will be a good read, even if it's similar to other current romances and hip-young-people books, since Adib Khorram is such a good writer.