Flamer by Mike Curato (review)

Boy Scout camp has long been the highlight of Aiden Navarro's year, a respite from classroom bullying and Dad's rages. This summer of 1995, though, finds fourteenyear-old Aiden dragging a load of emotional baggage with him to camp—the looming transition from Catholic grade school to public high school, obsession with body image, and an epic struggle to reconcile urgent questions about his sexual identity with religious tenets that suggest he's bound for hell. Bullying has followed him to camp as well, and it's not just his imagination that every stray remark brewed into a sexual (and usually homophobic) joke seems directed at him. Add in the impetuous kiss he plants on the cheek of straight arrow Elias, which imperils his only genuine friendship at camp, and the dismissal of a well-liked camp counselor who was accidentally outed, and Aiden sees no way forward; he hikes to the empty chapel with his folding knife, ready to end his life. The beneficent fiery vision that plucks Aiden from the precipice and gives him hope is a style of deliverance that few similarly pressed adolescents can expect, but the rest of the portrait of deeply imbedded sexualized and homophobic bullying in this autobiographically grounded tale rings true. The restrained harmony between Aiden's fraught narration and the black linework accented in incendiary red and orange packs an emotional wallop, making this an accessible choice not just for questioning kids but for their more confident friends who could use an empathy jumpstart.