Brooklyn, Burning (review)

After Kid's gender and sexual orientation ambiguity prove too much for his/her father to accept, the fifteen-year-old lives on the streets in Brooklyn, finding friendship and solace amid a group of older people who frequent a friendly neighborhood bar. There Kid meets and falls in love with Felix, even though friends warn Kid that Felix is a junkie. The summer after Felix dies of an overdose, Kid is still reeling with grief when Scout appears with a guitar, and the two become attached and fall in love; meanwhile, police question Kid about burning down a warehouse where Felix and Kid were known to stay. Scout, like Kid, is never assigned a gender, and the majority of the book consists of them moving around Brooklyn and seducing each other with their music while trying to convince Fish, the owner of the bar, to let them stay in the basement. Though stylish in its sadness, the the book is too thin in its plot to bear the weight of the characters' emotional intensities; Scout's backstory is never revealed, and the repetitiveness of the couple's days and nights bogs down any forward movement. The mystery of the fire, however, as well as the tightly drawn setting in real New York City neighborhoods, may prove enough for readers already intrigued by the authorial decision to keep the gender of the characters in flux, a device that works flawlessly through the use of Kid's first-person narration and the carefully drawn responses of other characters. With its development of a supportive ersatz family and its happy-as-it's-going-to-get ending, this will appeal to readers who enjoyed David Levithan's Love Is the Higher Law (BCCB BCCB 10/09).