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Summary
Summary
Hartinger's debut novel is a fast-paced and funny portrait of contemporary teenagers who may not learn any actual geography in their latest club, but who learn plenty about the treacherous social terrain of a typical American high school.
Author Notes
Brent Hartinger has been a full-time author for many years, writing novels, plays, and screenplays. He lives in Washington State. Among his books are Geography Club and its sequel, The Order of the Poison Oak, as well as The Last Chance Texaco and Split Screen. Like Dave and his friends, as a teenager he resisted getting a job for as long as possible but finally was forced by his parents to go to work as a lifeguard at age sixteen. He still smells like coconut sunblock.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Gay high school students form a small support group called the Geography Club. According to PW, "Overall, this novel does a fine job of presenting many of the complex realities of gay teen life, and also what it takes to be a `thoroughly decent' person." Ages 13-up. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
(High School) While placing a story in the milieu of a support group is almost certainly a clue that Messages will fly thick and fast, two new YA novels also each exploit the device for its irresistible lure: listening in as people reveal their secrets. In Alt Ed, Susan has been sentenced to an after-school discussion group of troublemakers for her alleged involvement in vandalizing another student's truck. This may be the least of her problems: Susan is the school fat girl, and it doesn't help that her dad is the football coach and refuses to discuss Susan's mother, dead five years. Predictably, involvement in the group does help Susan with all this, but in a believably gradual way and not always in predictable directions. She becomes friends with the school gay kid, Brendan, who is in the group for the same crime as Susan--as is the boy whose truck was damaged. The relationships among the kids are conveyed primarily through dialogue, as you would expect, but the voices are distinct and so are the kids. Although its concerns are as serious as Susan's, Geography Club has a better sense of humor. When Russel finds out he's not the only gay kid at Goodkind High School--conveniently, his cohorts are Kevin, the jock he has a crush on; and his best friend Min, who's been hiding her relationship with a girl on the soccer team--he joins with them to start an after-school support group, which they code name the Geography Club to insure that no one else will join. (Until the day Belinda, who actually wants to join a geography club, shows up.) If anything, this book is even more agenda-driven than Alt Ed, but what gives it distinction is Russel's pointed narration, pitch-perfect as the slightly superior, world-weary, and ironic gay boy who you know will make a grand success of himself once he manages to get past adolescence. Listening to locker-room bragging from a boy going on and on about hisgirlfriend ""begging for it,"" he thinks, ""That's a lot of begging.... Who was Jarred dating--a homeless person?"" Yet his agonies of ostracism (and first love) are truly conveyed--in all, this is the most artful and authentic depiction of a gay teen since M. E. Kerr's groundbreaking Charlie Gilhooly in I'll Love You When You're More Like Me. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Gr. 7^-12. Russel is gay, and he knows he better keep it secret, or he'll be a total outcast in his small-town high school. But then he discovers that there are others like him--including Min, his longtime best friend, and her lesbian lover, as well as gorgeous, popular jock star Kevin. Seven of them form a support group (the "Geography Club" is their cover-up name), and for a short time, life is blissful. Russel has friends with whom he can be himself, and he also makes love with Kevin. Then things fall apart. Russel refuses to have sex with a girl, and word gets out that he's gay. Kevin can't come out, so he and Russel break up. Things are settled a little too neatly in the end, but there's no sermonizing. With honest talk of love and cruelty, friendship and betrayal, it's Russel's realistic, funny, contemporary narrative that makes this first novel special. The dialogue is right on; so is the high-school cafeteria; so is the prejudice. Booktalk this. --Hazel Rochman
School Library Journal Review
Gr 10 Up-Russel Middlebrook is a sophomore at Goodkind High School. He has a secret crush on a baseball jock, Kevin Land, and soon discovers that Kevin is also gay. The boys become friendly outside of school and set up the "Geography Club" with three other gay students, one of whom is Russel's closest friend, Min. The club members relish the opportunity to discuss their lives and to relate to one another openly and honestly. Eventually, however, intense peer pressure and insecurity take their toll. Russel's relationship with Kevin ends, but the "Geography Club" becomes the "Goodkind High School Gay-Straight-Bisexual Alliance," and the protagonist gains new insight into himself and his place in the world. Hartinger has written a compelling look at the high school scene and the serious consequences of being "different." The plot never falters. Dialogue flows smoothly and is always completely believable, and the occasional use of profanity adds to the realism of the story. Characterization is excellent, with all of the teens emerging as likable but flawed individuals caught in a situation that few young adults could handle with maturity. This author has something to say here, and his message is potent and effective in its delivery. Many teens, both gay and straight, should find this novel intriguing.-Robert Gray, East Central Regional Library, Cambridge, MN (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Much to his surprise (and relief), a closeted gay boy in high school discovers that he isn't the only homosexual teenager in his community. Russel Middlebrook, a sophomore at Goodkind High School, has a secret. Although he hasn't had physical sex yet, he knows in his heart that he's gay. News like that is tantamount to dynamite; socially it could blow him out of the "border region of high school respectability" he inhabits and into the land of the ostracized and set upon. Then Russel finds out that classmate Kevin Land, a handsome and popular star athlete, is a clandestine homosexual too. In a necessary but not very plausible plot twist, Russel confesses to his close female friend Min, who in turn admits to having a girlfriend. The teens desperately need to talk about their shared situation, so in an effort to find a safe haven and discourage other kids from coming around, they create the dullest after-school organization they can think of, the Geography Club. The group survives the addition of a straight girl with another kind of secret and Kevin and Russel's growing attachment, but its undoing comes when Min, knowing that they are only a whisper away from social ostracism themselves, fights to have Brian Bund, the "unquestioned outcast" of Goodkind, join their organization. Hartinger has to jiggle the plot to make it work, Russel's adventures in heterosexual dating feel forced and the conclusion strains credibility, yet overall the book is provocative, insightful, and in the end comforting. (Fiction. 12+)
Excerpts
Excerpts
Geography Club EPB Chapter One I was deep behind enemy lines, in the very heart of the opposing camp. My adversaries were all around me. For the time being, my disguise was holding, but still I felt exposed, naked, as if my secret was obvious to anyone who took the time to look. I knew that any wrong action, however slight, could expose my deception and reveal my true identity. The thought made my skin prickle. The enemy would not take kindly to my infiltration of their ranks, especially not here, in their inner sanctum. Then Kevin Land leaned over the wooden bench behind my locker and said, "Yo, Middlebrook, let me use your shampoo!" I was in the high school boys' locker room at the end of third period P.E. class. I'd just come from the showers, and part of the reason I felt naked was because I was naked. I'd slung my wet towel over the metal door of my locker and was standing there all goosebumpy, eager to get dressed and get the hell out of there. Why exactly did I feel like the boys' locker room after third period P.E. was enemy territory -- that the other guys in my class were rival soldiers in some warlike struggle for domination? Well, there's not really a short answer to that question. "Use your own damn shampoo," I said to Kevin, crouching down in front of my locker, probing the darkness for clean underwear. Kevin stepped right up next to me and started searching the upper reaches of my locker himself. I could feel the heat of his body, but it did nothing to lessen my goosebumps. "Come on," he said. "Where is it? I know you have some. You always have shampoo, just like you always have clean undies." I had just found my Jockey shorts, and I was tempted to not give Kevin the satisfaction of seeing he'd been right about me, but I was cold and tired of being exposed. I sat down on the bench, maneuvering my legs through the elastic of my underwear, then pulled them up. I fumbled for the shampoo in my backpack and handed it to Kevin. "Here," I said. "Just bring it back when you're done." Kevin was lean and muscled and dark, with perfect sideburns and a five o'clock shadow by ten in the morning. More important, he was naked too, and suddenly it seemed like there was no place to look in the entire locker room that wasn't his crotch. I glanced away, but there were more visual land mines to avoid -- specifically, the bodies of Leon and Brad and Jarred and Ramone, other guys from our P.E. class, all looking like one of those Abercrombie & Fitch underwear ads come to life. Okay, maybe there was a short answer to the question of why I felt out of place in the boys' locker room. I liked guys. Seeing them naked, I mean. But -- and this is worth emphasizing -- I liked seeing them naked on the Internet; I had absolutely no interest in seeing them naked, in person, in the boys' locker room after third period P.E. I'd never been naked with a guy -- I mean in a sexual way -- and I had no plans to do it anytime soon. But the fact that I even thought about getting naked with a guy in a sexual way was something that Kevin and Leon and Brad and Jarred and Ramone would never ever understand. I wasn't the most popular guy at Robert L. Goodkind High School, but I wasn't the least popular either. (Kevin Land at least spoke to me, even if it was only to ask for shampoo.) But one sure way to become the least popular guy was to have people think you might be gay. And not being gay wasn't just about not throwing a bone in the showers. It was a whole way of acting around other guys, a level of casualness, of comfort, that says, "I'm one of you. I fit in." I wasn't one of them, I didn't fit in, but they didn't need to know that. Kevin snatched the shampoo, and I deliberately turned my back to him, stepping awkwardly into my jeans. "Hey, Middlebrook!" Kevin said to me. "Nice ass!" Leon and Brad and Jarred and Ramone all laughed. Big joke, not exactly at my expense, but in my general vicinity. Some tiny part of me wondered, Do I have a nice ass? Hell, I didn't know. But a much bigger part of me tensed, because I knew this was a test, the kind enemy soldiers in movies give to the hero who they suspect isn't one of them. And from a guy I'd just lent my shampoo to, besides. So much for gratitude. Everything now depended on my reaction. Would I pass this, Kevin Land's latest test of my manhood? I glanced back at Kevin, who was still snickering. Halfway down his body, he jiggled, but of course I didn't look. Instead, I bent over halfway, sticking my rear out in his direction. "You really think so?" I said, squirming back and forth. "Middlebrook!" Kevin said, all teeth and whiskers and dimples. "You are such a fag!" Mission accomplished, I thought. My cover was holding -- for another day at least. Once I'd finished dressing, I met up with my friends Gunnar and Min for lunch at our usual table in the school cafeteria. "The paint is flaking off the ceiling in Mr. Wick's classroom," Gunnar said as we started to eat. "Sometimes the chips land on my desk." Gunnar and I had been friends forever, or at least since the fourth grade, when his family had moved from Norway to my neighborhood. I'd always thought he should be proud of being from somewhere different, but kids had teased him about his accent and his name (they called him "Goony" or "Gunner"), so he desperately tried to ignore his heritage. Gunnar was a thoroughly nice guy and perfectly loyal as a friend, but -- and this is hard to admit, him being a buddy and all -- just a little bit high-strung. Geography Club EPB . Copyright © by Brent Hartinger . Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Geography Club by Brent Hartinger All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
