A group of gay teens decide to get together and form a safe harbor group for themselves. They call it the Geography Club, because honestly, who’s going to be interested in a club about geography, of all things? Geography is boring to the majority of students that would actually hurt them if they knew about the truth behind the club and they feel no one will discover their group as long as they stay low-profile. Nothing could go wrong.

This story is not subtle! It is what it is, but subtle is about as far away from this entire story as can be. The feeling I get from this book is the same I get when I watch movies like The Breakfast Club, which are good for the sentimental value but are actually terrible.

I think we’ve moved past one-dimensional dealings with this issue. Everything about the book just sounds fake to me; the only thing that rings true is that high school sucks big balls. It’s the sort of book that gets the play and the press but when people outside the group praising it for being so groundbreaking pick it up they say, “Are you KIDDING?” This is written like a Lifetime Movie for kids, if the budget was $20 and I’m just so disappointed in the writing and the plotting. I am biased; I except writing to flow, like the pulse of a story, but this mess is…I don’t know what it is, but it hits sour notes over and over again with awkward narrative and terrible dialogue. I just feel like too many characters and too much stuff was piled into a very short book, which means everything got cheated. There were too many balls in the air for them all to be caught. The writing and the story are flat, the characters are one-dimensional, and at the end there’s a pretty bow. I’m embarrassed for this book.

(Also, the Jesus reference? Ugh.)

Teen lives are entirely more ambiguous and layered and this books just yanks all that out and replaces it with what reads like the reflection of a grown adult looking back; it feels very disingenuous.

I don’t like this idea that a book that is written so weakly can garner this much praise from a community just because we’re so starved for some kind of substance or representation. You think I would be used to this as that happens in fandom constantly. Weak writing with a weak plot can be lauded as long as it’s What Fandom Wants at the time. I have a feeling this book came on the scene at a time where books with sympathetic gay characters for teens were hard to find. I get that there was not a lot of literature, but if someone wants to sell me on something being groundbreaking after the fact, they have to work a little harder convincing me that the lazy writing in this book is the best we can do in a genre that is wide open. Perhaps it’s because the genre is wide open that this book is so fantastically mediocre.

I’ll admit I’m too old for this in-your-face lesson. It bugs me because it becomes less of a living story and more a vehicle for the moralizing about tolerance and being true to who you are and that sometimes life is a bitch, but it gets better after high school. This book was talking down to teens in the worst way. It’s an Issue Book and I am not a fan of Issue Books (I wasn’t when I was a teen either; I saw right through them and grew tired of the Infinite Wisdom of The Adult Author). They cheat the depth of life, the thing that good books can mirror. That’s why they’re good books!

I’m glad this is available for kids to pick up, but I’m even more pleased that better authors are moving in to render this title obsolete with stories that are constructed better and pay attention to how teens have real lives outside their sexuality.

None!