Gravel Queen
Grade 8 Up-It's the summer between their junior and senior years of high school for Aurin and her friends Kenney and Fred. Fred has known he's gay for as long as he can remember, but Aurin discovers her attraction to Neila, a new girl in town, as the novel progresses. The plot centers on her awakening to her sexual identity and the difficulty she has in maintaining her old friendships while pursuing the new intimacy. Unfortunately, Benduhn's characters lack enough depth or dimension to engage readers. The teens' activities revolve around hanging out in a park in their hometown of Greensboro, NC, and attending a ballroom-dancing class. The most intense moments in the book come when Aurin describes her physical reactions to the sight, sound, and feel of Neila and they involve so much scampering of squirrels in her stomach and fizzling sensations in her limbs that they seem more like a gastric attack than love. The characters do manage to suppress their possessiveness and jealousies and reach a new configuration of their relationships, but the author neglects to reveal other facets of their experiences. Or maybe these are just shallow kids. Even so, one would imagine that coming to grips with one's lesbianism-or one's lifelong best girlfriend's lesbianism-might involve more introspection than is displayed here. A vague and disappointing novel.Miriam Lang Budin, Chappaqua Public Library, NYCopyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.