Okay, look at this cover. Would you guess from seeing it that this book is written entirely from the POV of a teenage boy and is all about first love, sex, making the wrong choice about how to handle a big problem and making the right choice about how to fix it and more than anything else about how to be a man?
After the Moment by Garret Freymann-Weyr is a coming-of-age story for high school boys. And it has a yellow cover with a picture of a teenage girl. If this kind of book is being marketed to girls rather than boys then I think I can safely say that publishers have decided all teenage boys are clueless and not worthy of a single intelligent book. This is not a case of boys not reading, this is a case of an author writing a great book for boys and a publisher (hello Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) deciding not to sell it to them.
They might as well have pasted the words "GIRLY BOOK" across the cover.
I know there are boys out there who will read a book with a girl's picture on the cover (all 15 of them) but I just don't think there are enough of them to justify this. And the shame of it is that After the Moment is a really great book. Leigh is a smart protagonist, his concerns are valid, his family problems/issues are easily identifiable and his love for Maia, who is pretty spectacularly screwed up, is honest. The best part is what Leigh does when something rather bad happens to Maia (but happens in a most uncliched way). Leigh responds as maturely as you would expect and then as immaturely as you would expect. In other words, he's awesome and even when he's wrong he's still also, to a certain degree, right. And through it all he is always trying to figure out the best way to be a brother, son and boyfriend. It's a great book and a lot of teenage boys would identify with him and his worries. It's too bad they won't ever read it because the publisher didn't trust them enough to believe they would want to buy it.
If you know a teen boy of the Jess Mariano or Dean or Xander variety then buy the book (when it comes out in May), recover it in brown paper and put it into their hands. They'll appreciate the effort, trust me.
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January 4
2009
08:32 AM
Houghton Mifflin. Why am I not surprised. You'd think that the publishing industry would do everything in its power to guarantee maximum book sales instead of the exact opposite. Then again, maybe they enjoy laying off employees as much as any other American company.