Review: An amazing book
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 03 9, 2012
"I don't remember the moment I knew I was broken...but I do know the moment I began to feel fixed. It was the day the green-eyed boy fell in love with me." (Kyle)Maybe With a Chance of Certainty is a coming of age novel like no other. Its story revolves around Kyle, a battered, oft physically abused 17 year old who lives with a drunken mother and a fear that someday someone will truly see him, will discover he is gay and will force him out into the light of day that he so adroitly avoids. Enter Brad, baseball hero, god of high school fame, abused and broken 17 year old who steadfastly hides in the closet until he sees Kyle, really sees him and knows...knows that this is what he has been missing...that this boy is one he likes maybe, with a chance of certainty.This book is, in my opinion, a must read for any young man or woman struggling to make their way in this world. It is a hand placed carefully, lovingly on the shoulder of a nation of broken teens whose thoughts gravitate toward suicide, and self-doubt, despair and self-loathing...it is a whisper into their fragile hearts and worried minds that says, I know you...I see you...I want you to know...you are not alone.This book is never glib or self-important but it is humorous and self-aware. This book is never trite or condescending but it does dare to look at the smallest of fears and bring them into the light and it does meet us right at the emotional level we live and it says we have the right to live there, to feel as we do.This book, this sweet moment of a life that has been so trapped in fear and so relentlessly battered cries out that each one of us deserves the chance to be happy, deserves the right to be cherished, deserves the right to live without fear.Never does this novel insult us by offering sweet and bland euphemisms for the feelings that real teens experience every day. It does not look at the sometimes hellish place high school can be for so many and paint it with a fairy tale brush. It does not demand that we "get over it" and move on because "someone else always has it worse than us". No, this books says, your life is important...your pain is real...your story is one worth telling...one I want to hear.John Goode allows us to see how people can be standing right in front of us and we can miss it--miss their pain, miss their hurt, miss them completely if we never stop and take the moment to look, really look and see who they are, how beautiful they are, how special they are.Every once in a while, a novel comes along and it grabs us and shakes us to our very core. And after we have finished, we understand that we have been made just a bit better by the reading of it...that we have been made just a bit richer because of it, that we have been shown truth and love in its purest form. That is what John Goode's novel, Maybe With a Chance of Certainty, has done for me.