The Arizona Kid by Ron Koertge
My rating: 4/5 cats
i was all braced to not like this one. it was for the humor section of the reading list, and surely my sense of humor is more refined and nuanced than a teenager’s, right. RIGHT?? i just figured it would be silly and not really a stick-to-your-cranium kind of book.
but this is dr. chelton and this book:
so i had to read it. how else am i going to grow up to be her? (and i was the only one in the whole class to choose to read it. i should give lessons in smooching up to teacher, because it is just shameful—these oversights and missed opportunities)
but it is a really good story; teen goes to stay with his gay uncle in arizona to work with horses in order to get experience because he wants to be a vet. while there, he loses his virginity (neither to his gay uncle nor to a horse), battles the heat, learns about courage, friendship, love; several generic teen fiction themes, and what it means to leave a place in which you have changed so much. the whole book is very sensitively drawn, but with actual humor. there is some overly broad comic relief in the form of a friend’s survivalist father, but every scene between billy and his uncle is brilliant and the way teen sexuality is handled is neither shy nor gratuitous. the changes billy undergoes are at once subtle and realistic. i opted to not read his poetry book for the books-in-verse week because it sounded awful (shakespeare bats cleanup—no thank you), but i would recommend this one, and if i found myself reading another of his novels, i would be very pleased.
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