This book is amazing. A-M-A-Z-I-N-G.
I laughed out LOUD, really, I had to pay attention who were near me while reading it.
And at 94% I just HAD to STOP to read. I was at work, and I knew there were no way I can go through the last 6 % reading it in public. The first thing I did when I came home today, I read the last 6% and I cried. I am a mess now. Maybe I'll write some day a proper review, but from my experience I know that I am not able to write a review for a book that touched me in this way. No reviews can do it justice.

All I can say, READ THIS BOOK. If you're Jewish or Protestant, READ THIS BOOK, if you love baseball, READ THIS BOOK. If you DON'T LIKE kids in your books, read it. If you enjoy historical fiction, don't miss it. If you are parents, lovers, friends, READ IT. If you want a book that makes you laugh out loud and makes you cry, READ THIS BOOK.

My Charlie Banks, New York Giants third baseman


Joey Margolis, a twelve year old Jewish boy


I LOVE this book so much.


Reading Challenge 2017 - 3. A book of letters.

A high school jock and nerd fall in love senior year, only to part after an amazing summer of discovery to attend their respective colleges. They keep in touch at first, but then slowly drift apart. .........Flash forward twenty years.Travis and Craig both have great lives, careers, and loves. But something is missing .... Travis is the first to figure it out. He's still in love with Craig, and come what may, he's going after the boy who captured his heart, even if it means forsaking his job, making a fool of himself, and entering the great unknown. Told in narrative, letters, checklists, and more, this is the must-read novel for anyone who's wondered what ever happened to that first great love.

Amazon.com

 

 

 

 

Living in 1970s New York, high school jock Craig McKenna introduces himself to academically-geared theater nerd Travis Puckett their senior year at a boy's boarding school. Craig wants to enlist Travis's help with a essay writing assignment. A friendship develops between them, which later blossoms into a romance, catching them both off-guard. Travis has suspected his true orientation for some time but is hesitant to admit it aloud. Craig is completely stunned at the intensity of his feelings for Travis, having always dated women previously. Still, the heart wants what it wants so they both decide to roll with it and see where it goes. 

 

They try to keep it on the DL for awhile, but people still seem to suspect, as Travis gets a heavy amount of gay-bashing, at least until burly built Craig steps in to shut down the bullies. After the school year wraps, the guys decide to get an apartment together for the summer, allowing them some serious quality time before they start their college lives. The summer ends too quick though, and after a tearful parting the two start their separate paths. They try the long distance thing for a bit, writing and calling when they can but eventually drift apart. 

 

Twenty years pass. Travis is now a history professor at University of Southern California, where he got his degree. Craig, after earning a law degree from Harvard is now a highly respected lawyer still living in New York who uses his professional clout to advocate for gay rights. It's during this time that the reader gets a look into Craig's work and experiences during the growing AIDS / HIV epidemic of the 1980s and 90s, and the heightened atmosphere of fear mixed with the realization of the need for awareness & education. Craig loses several close friends to the disease, amping his advocacy drive even more. He never stops thinking of Travis all these years but figures the past is the past and there's no way to go back. Little does he know that Travis hasn't forgotten him either, but instead has recently become inspired to find Craig and reconnect. Can Travis hope for even an ember of interest still burning in his first love?

 

This is the second of Kluger's books I've picked up, having just stumbled across it in a local bookstore recently. A couple years back I read his historical fiction epistolary novel Last Days of Summer and loved it so much that Kluger's name went on my mental automatic buy list ... but I never found any more of his stuff til now! Similar to that last novel, this one has a theme of baseball history, and looking at a few other of Kluger's books I've since discovered online (the synopses anyway) it seems to be a common thread between ALL his books. 

 

I can't say the plot to this novel sucked me in quite as much as Last Days Of Summer but I still definitely enjoyed it! Travis and Craig did make a cute couple, though in their early years Travis could seem a little clingy at times (guess we're all guilty of it sometimes, though :-) ). It took me a little longer to get invested in this storyline but my interest shot up quite a bit once the story got into Craig's activism work. Some of the scenes described there are incredibly moving and sometimes heartbreaking! I also liked that little side story with Gordo and AJ -- their banter back and forth as their relationship grew was sweet without being grossly syrupy. 

 

Final verdict -- Kluger still an auto-buy for me, his stories are just too fun...and I'm not even the biggest follower of baseball!

This is the rare book I've told my husband he has to read, it's non-negotiable.  Brilliant, funny, poignant.  It's also one of those rare books that has a summary that exactly captures the flavour of the book itself.

 

But it GUTTED me.  I was laughing like crazy and then suddenly I wasn't.  I considered dinging it 1/2 star for this but it doesn't deserve it - the story couldn't have ended any other way and still have the same gravitas.  Then, I read the "About the Author" at the end and well... gut.ted.

 

If you like baseball (loving baseball works even better) and the era of the 40's and don't mind a fair amount of strong language coming from the mouths of 12 year old boys, and truly enjoy laughing, this book is perfect.  The vernacular used is in keeping with the time and place, but it might be a bit confusing - the slang isn't always easy to translate, although the context clarifies most of the obscure ones.

 

In my love of books, I put this one up with 84 Charing Cross Road.  Even if I ended up gutted.

 

SPOILER ALERT:  Great conversation in the comments below - but the conversation is riddled with spoilers and since we currently don't have a way of clearly marking them, take this as a general blanket warning that reading the comments will likely give away significant plot points.

I'm late, but I only got the one book and had forgotten it arrived this week.

 

Someone here on BookLikes reviewed this sometime back and loved it and since I'm a huge fan of baseball, and the blurb was hysterical, I had to give it a try.

 

 

REVIEW WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT DEAR AUTHOR

 

 

 

A high school jock and nerd fall in love senior year, only to part after an amazing summer of discovery to attend their respective colleges. They keep in touch at first, but then slowly drift apart.
Flash forward twenty years.

Travis and Craig both have great lives, careers, and loves. But something is missing …. Travis is the first to figure it out. He’s still in love with Craig, and come what may, he’s going after the boy who captured his heart, even if it means forsaking his job, making a fool of himself, and entering the great unknown. Told in narrative, letters, checklists, and more, this is the must-read novel for anyone who’s wondered what ever happened to that first great love.

Review:

Dear Steve Kluger,

I first read this book three or four years ago and ever since it has remained on my top ten lists of favorite m/m/gay romances. Not all books manage to stay on my favorites list because new and better ones come along, but your book is still there.

The blurb states it but I want to say it again – the story is not told in a regular narrative style. I am not sure if it can be called an epistolary novel, because it does not only consist of letters. It has clips from imaginary newspaper articles, diary entries, memos that characters would write to their employees and letters to friends. This is how the story is told, and if such a style does not work for you, you will not like this book. Otherwise I highly recommend buying this one the moment you finish reading this review.

The first chapter introduces us to your seemingly standard characters from YA gay romance – jock and nerd. Despite the way story is written, I thought the book managed to convey both guys’ thoughts extremely well and from the very beginning I was intrigued by both of them. They become friends who want to know more about each other and learn more and more about each other, until they realize that they are in love with each other. They get to their first kiss as Craig describes it to us:

“I kissed him, I fucking kissed him. First our noses touched and then I kissed him.
I shouldn’t have smoked the joint. I knew that was a mistake! But what else can you do when you’re playing catch and it starts to pour? If there hadn’t been one of those metal arch things with the benches underneath, it never would have happened – we’d have jogged back to school, wet and unkissed. This was a conspiracy!”

We learn that the guys had an amazing summer together after they graduated high school but eventually drifted apart because they went to different colleges.
However, instead of continuing the story chronologically, the second chapter flashes forward twenty years to 1998 and we are now introduced to Travis as a college professor. I hope this can give you a little glimpse of Travis as a history college professor.

“ BOOK PROPOSAL.
“Alexander Hamilton and the Designated Hitter”.
Issue: Once we’d won our independence from the Crown, how were we going to set up the House?
Objective: proving that the baseball and the United States Constitution were founded on the same set of rules, as outlined in the Federal papers by Alexander Hamilton”

The whole book proposal is a bit more detailed, so if you end up reading a book, you will get to read it in the longer form, but I think the topic alone gives a good glimpse at Travis’ personality.

After that chapter we meet Craig, who in the year 1998 is an attorney in a small private practice and who seems to have a passion for changing the world around him. Craig also seems to credit Travis for instilling in him the desire to change the world. Craig is also with Clayton, who I fell for probably faster than I fell for both Craig and Travis. Clayton is just such a nice guy, someone who suffered an abusive childhood and is scared now that people whom he loves will leave him. As an aside, I have read so many m/m romances where the heroes had abusive childhoods and I am yet to see many stories where the writer spends so few words describing it and invoking the sympathy for Clayton right away as opposed to writing many pages full of angsty storytelling.

“But nobody needed to be loved more than my boyfriend did. When the father he’d idolized had found out his kid liked men, he’d thrown him out of the house bodily. (“You make me sick,” he’d said, slamming the door on his only son.). Clayton never sufficiently recovered, especially after old man died. Instead, he inherited a legacy that became his trademark: If it looks like they’re going to dump you, beat them to it. It saves a lot of wear and tear on the heart. So I never allowed our skirmishes to get in the way for too long”

As much as the style allows, the chapters switch between Craig and Travis (and those characters who they communicate with, like Craig’s boyfriend Clayton, Travis’ friend Gordon, and so on).

We learn that Travis cannot find a boyfriend who will satisfy his “Boyfriend checklist” (a hilarious one, but it is really hard to quote stuff from this book because so much of it is not in a regular format and this checklist alone takes three pages in the book). He eventually realizes that he never forgot Craig and starts a crazy adventure of trying to find Craig and see if the love they shared can be rekindled twenty years later.

“Okay, maybe he doesn’t need a psychopathic history professor showing up from the Twilight Zone, and maybe he won’t even like me anymore. But he still has my heart – and if he is not using it, I want it back. Otherwise I’m going to go on loving him for the rest of my life. And there’s not a damned thing either of us can do about it.
Somehow I never got around telling him that.”

Travis eventually finds Craig, I do not think I will spoil anything by telling you this, but the little complication is that Craig, while not being able to forget Travis altogether is also genuinely in love with Clayton, who as I said before is a kind, generous soul. I will not tell you what happens, but there is a happy ending for everybody. I can tell you that amongst many other things that I think Steve Kluger did so well, this book completely spoiled me for the resolution of the love triangle. I hate love triangles in most stories, especially if everybody is good people, because I do not want to see anybody broken hearted. I sigh happily every time I reread the ending of this book.

I also think that this story mixed humor and serious things really well – as the reader learns about the lives Craig and Travis lived apart for twenty years we of course hear about the AIDS epidemic for example. How could we not hear about it, since it affected them and their friends so much? But I never felt that the writer used a heavier touch describing it than the rest of the book and for me it worked perfectly.

I have to admit, I think everything worked perfectly for me in this book. The characters I can never forget and want to imagine that they are living their lives helping people around them. The writing style, the humor, I liked it all.

Grade : A